cosmo-torun

Boud Roukema boud_roukema w camk.edu.pl
Czw, 20 Gru 2001, 16:57:34 CET


Cze¶æ Andrzej, everyone,

> By the way: this is what I always wanted to know (but was afraid to ask before :-)
> if "cosmo-torun" is somehow arbitrarily limited to .torun.pl domain and serves Toruñ
> people only or it actually means:
> 
> "cosmo-torun-warszawa-paris-etc-if-you-only-want-to-join-and-share-ideas"
> 
> To be more specific:  how about inviting the cosmologists from CAMK, Warszawa
> (Staszek, Ewa, etc.). Maybe you could just take the opportunity of sitting next to
> them and talk to them. You know them better than I do so I leave this issue entirely
> to your discretion.
> 
> What I particularly have in mind (if we decide to join the forces, of
> course) is to organise such "one-afternoon-workshops" in the future
> together with Warsaw people. (To this end sometimes they would come to
> Piwnice, sometimes we would go to CAMK, or sometimes we could meet
> half(?)-way, at CAMK-Toruñ.)

This is a meta-discussion. ;-)

Thanks for these questions. These are all open questions, and the
short answer is that I think that some things should be done on this
list, and others "spun off" to other lists. What to keep on this list
and what to spin off depends on what people want, how eager they are to
use these lists, how willing they are to do the (small but nonzero)
work of being formal list administrators, and the (bigger) work of
making the lists really function (in terms of science and people!) and
be useful.

My idea is to have the cosmo-torun list focussed mainly on Toruñ
cosmologists - including doctoral and undergrad students, but open to
our collaborators, in particular from Warsaw. I think this is open
enough and should have a critical mass of people (to have a variety of
opinions, enough people that someone answers reasonably quickly, etc.)
to discuss creating other lists, e.g.

Ideas for spinoff lists:
-------------
* cosmo-seminar: 
For organising meetings (whatever the title, "journal club", "seminar", 
"workshop", "conference") in Toruñ and/or Warsaw and/or other Polish
cities (e.g. there's a theoretical cosmo group in Kraków). I suggest
no access restrictions, since no "unpublished research ideas" are likely
to be posted here. 

This might be mostly Toruñ and Warsaw people to start off with, but
could expand naturally as more people become interested.

I think this is too much discussion for the cosmo-torun list, because
apart from choosing times, formats, speakers, there's also the 
question of how to retain fairness to undergrads, doctoral students
so that they are not disadvantaged by the costs of travel and 
accommodation, and of providing travel & accommodation costs 
in general. The solutions are probably not difficult, but I think
they should be discussed openly and freely. This requires (IMHO) 
a specific list.

* cosmo-pl: 
For general discussion, organisational, scientific, whatever, among
Polish cosmologists and extragalacticians. Again, no access restrictions.

specific research project lists, 
e.g. 
* topo-rlagn: [cosmic topology radio-loud AGN projects]
My suggestion is for access to be restricted to the sites of
collaborators on the projects until publication.  For collaborators on
big sites (e.g. IAP), they could choose just a few individual
computers for access.  But I think a moderate level of paranoia is
sufficient - this follows actual practice, in any case.

I think it would be especially interesting to open up research
project archives to unrestricted access once the article is accepted
and on astro-ph. This would mean people curious about the background
to an article, or battles with referees, would be able to read the
full detail for themselves, and help demystify the process of
scientific research.

undergrad course lists:
* shape-univ:
I've offered to Andrzej Woszczyk and said to some students that I
would be happy to teach a "monograph course" on observational 
constraints on the shape of the Universe (curvature + topology)
during the next semester (which I believe starts 18th Feb 2002).

While students of this course should feel welcome to join the
main cosmo-torun list, this particular list would be focussed on 
the subject matter of the course itself. Since a lot of background
material already exists on the web, I would hope that students
would contribute by searching themselves with search engines like
http://www.google.com  and helping *construct* and discuss and
debate a list of good web links to existing material.

general (not just cosmo) lists at TCfA:
There's no point competing with existing TCfA lists. But there
are presumably some uses for one or more lists within the centre,
and people might appreciate having the web support of sympa. 
(They would be welcome to shift a list to sympa.)

Are there any existing lists? Someone told me something about a list
called astronomia w astri.uni.torun.pl . It seems to me one list which
could be useful (for publicity purposes) would be one for discussing
TCfA web pages. It's not always obvious what changes are good ones,
and it's a lot of pressure on the webmaster if he/she alone has to
decide to accept/reject suggestions/requests. A mailing list would
make the decisions more collective.


Managing all the above with the minimum of effort (apart from the
initial learning process, and installation of sympa) and with the
possibility for people to access archives via the web and/or email
according to their individual preferences is the reason why sympa was
worth installing, IMHO.

Pozdrawiam
Boud

 



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