COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

The recently established CMS Communications Group, led by Lucas Taylor, has been busy in all three of its main are areas of responsibility: Communications Infrastructure, Information Systems, and Outreach and Education

Communications Infrastructure

The damage caused by the flooding of the CMS Centre@CERN on 21st December has been completely repaired and all systems are back in operation. Major repairs were made to the roofs, ceilings and one third of the floor had to be completely replaced. Throughout these works, the CMS Centre was kept operating and even hosted a major press event for first 7 TeV collisions, as described below.

Incremental work behind the scenes is steadily improving the quality of the CMS communications infrastructure, particularly Webcasting, video conferencing, and meeting rooms at CERN.

CERN/IT is also deploying a pilot service of a new videoconference tool called Vidyo, to assess whether it might provide an enhanced service at a lower cost, compared to the EVO tool currently in widespread use. Vidyo is already regularly used for remote Computing Operations shifts at CMS Centres.

Information Systems

These are in need of significant revamping, and refocusing as we move from the construction phase to the physics analysis phase of the experiment.

There are 245 official CMS Web sites at CERN alone and many more offsite. Sites overlap in content and are in need of updating, consolidation or retirement. Work has started to improve the CMS top-level pages and to create new pages for physics results. Plans are being prepared to bring the CMS Web sites as a whole into a more useful and maintainable state, possibly with the help of a CERN-wide Web Content Management System. The goal is to make it much easier for CMS collaborators to find information and to keep it up-to-date and correct.

CMS has produced an estimated 100,000 documents so far, only about half of which are stored in official systems (iCMS, CDS, EDMS, Indico, etc.). Therefore the “lightweight” Fermilab “DocDB” Document Management System is being deployed and all sub-systems will be asked to harvest their existing documents from their communities and enter them into the easy-to-use DocDB system. A longer term goal is to have a coherent user interface to all CERN document systems with powerful search capabilities.

Outreach and Education – the 7 TeV Media Event

Following the successful LHC startup in September 2008 and the subsequent helium leak incident, the press has kept the LHC very much in the public view.

Just before 7am on 30th March 2010, TV crews and reporters started to arrive in numbers at the CMS Centre @ CERN, Meyrin, hoping to witness first collisions at 7 TeV. More than 50 media organizations visited the CMS Centre during the day, from a total of about 100 at CERN.


In addition, 42 (of the total 52) CMS Centres Worldwide held media events for their national and local press, researchers and VIPs – the Dubna event alone hosted more than 100 people. Locations ranged from Los Angeles to Tehran, from Sao Paolo to Seoul, and included 12 capital cities.

The CMS Communications group coordinated live feeds of the day’s events to all CMS Centres Worldwide, and to CERN’s building 40 for ATLAS and CMS collaborators. In all CMS Centres, physicist interviewees explained what was happening and what we hope to discover in the coming LHC run at 7 TeV.

Event display images of the first 7 TeV collisions were broadcast by CMS-TV simultaneously to all CMS Centres just minutes after they happened. CERN immediately held a press conference at which CMS showed event display images, an animation of a real collision, and even reconstructed particle mass spectra. CMS issued a press statement translated into 20 different languages by CMS Collaborators.


More than 2,200 news items appeared on the 30th March, with more than 800 TV broadcasts using CERN footage. Many focused on CMS due to the press-friendly setup of the CMS Centre @ CERN and to our unique network of CMS Centres Worldwide. Thanks to the efforts of CMS collaborators, these resulted in additional CMS media coverage by about 75 TV channels, 100 radio stations, and directly led to an additional 300 written articles.

Good use of Web 2.0 communications tools meant that 700,000 distinct people watched the CERN Webcast (181,000 for the CMS Webcast), CERN's public homepage recorded 205,000 unique visitors from 185 countries (24,000 for CMS), CERN had 120,000 Twitter followers (4,000 for CMS), and the CMS-TV live event display channel was followed by 17,000 people, receiving 1.6 million Web hits.

One journalist, comparing us to NASA’s space programme, rather generously wrote that the 7 TeV media event demonstrated our new-found leadership in public relations. In fact, the 7 TeV event clearly marked the arrival of the LHC as the world’s new leading particle accelerator.


by L. Taylor