Cze�� 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 Toru� 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-Toru�.)

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 Toru� 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 Toru� and/or Warsaw and/or other Polish cities (e.g. there's a theoretical cosmo group in Krak�w). I suggest no access restrictions, since no "unpublished research ideas" are likely to be posted here.

This might be mostly Toru� 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@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