Communication is crucial. We need good communication to coordinate the effort, to interact for new ideas, and to inform each other of progress and errors made. Archiving is important too. Ideas might get lost, and who has made what contribution might be less clear over time. We believe the most valuable ideas and accomplishments are those that benefit the group effort. We also want to make the project page serve the purpose of "registering" efforts in the group.

When you broadcast your ideas, contributions and efforts here, it benefits the group, or at least the team of people in the group working on the project, and you get the credit on file. This is similar to publishing a paper except that it is strictly inside the group, and not just positive results count. It also registers your effort, and brilliant, or sometimes not so brilliant, ideas are all important.

Of course, we recognize that the project page can at best be a partial record of one's contribution. Interactions between members of our groups are not limited to the project page, and one can of course influence and contribute to the group in many ways, e.g., in group meetings and in face to face discussions. In this regard, please be kind to your colleagues, give them due credit in your postings. The pages will not be used to determine authorship on a paper, but they can help us remember what ideas have been suggested, and who suggested them.

Postings are not meant to be re-broadcasted to the outside world. Please keep information obtained through project page as private discussions. Do not disclose it to the outside world unless you have checked with the originator of the posting. We trust everybody in the group to observe this. While many projects are open to the entire extended group, some may be restricted to a few people working on them, e.g., in special cases for projects in collaboration with people outside the extended group. The projects setup in the project page is expected to be dynamic. Projects will merge, split, die, emerge and evolve. If you want to create a new project, or have any suggestion on the organization of the project page, please let Ed S or Wai-Mo know.

People are listed on a particular project because they do (or should) have a particular interest in that project. Being listed means that you will receive all postings. Please pay attention to postings, and send comments and ideas. However, being listed does not mean that you are necessarily an author of a paper on that project. In most cases the authors of papers are subsets of the entire listing group. Because some projects span several and sometimes overlapping efforts leading to papers, and because papers and authors can change rapidly, it may be difficult to separate "authors" from "interested bystanders" on these pages. Authorship is a dynamic issue that depends on work that is actually done on a particular paper. Postings will help to define this, but of course they are not the only way. There may be some exception cases where it is possible to define, on the page, who is expected to be an author on particular papers.

SO PLEASE POST!!

Ed Seidel and Wai-Mo Suen