[Fsatom-comm] II. Computations vs Simulations ; demand for joining the committee

[Konrad Hinsen]

Xavier Gonze <gonze@pcpm.ucl.ac.be> writes:

> The more profound thing is as follows : there is already
> a demand for a "new" member joining the committee !
> I put "new" in quote, because it is actually Paolo
> Giannozzi, who was present at the workshop. Well, the demand

I am a bit surprised by the reasoning, and it makes me wonder how
you others see the role of this committee as well as of the whole
FSAtom project.

Let's start by what we (FSAtom) are not: we are not a legal entity of
any kind, we have no money, no power, in fact nothing but good
intentions. So why do we have a steering committee if there isn't
even anything to steer at the moment?

I see the role of this committee as being a smaller group of people
(smaller than the current or potential FSAtom community) that can take
initiatives and discuss ideas quickly. For the composition of the
committee that means that we should have as few members as possible
while still covering a wide range of expertise. I do not think that it
is necessary or even desirable to have a representative of each
project in the committee. The committee is not a parliament. If we
follow that road, we will soon need to elect an executive board of the
steering committee, and that's the first step to bureaucracy.

I think that people should join and leave the board as a function of
their activity, projects, available time, etc. Most importantly, I
think we should not start to waste too much time discussing
formalities at this time, before any real activity has started. In
other words, I propose to postpone any detailed discussion of changing
the composition of the committee until we all have gained some
experience with what we can and can't do.

What we should however do is create the status of a "member" of the
FSAtom community. Membership should be open to anyone related to any
free-software project in our domain, even if it is only in the
planning stage (that probably translates to "anyone who wants to
become a member"). Members would be listed on the Web site, and be
able to participate in a member mailing list. It should be clear that
one can be involved in FSAtom without being in the committee, and it
should in fact be clear that most work is not done by the committee.

> I would have preferred to avoid such questions until the FSatom
> had reached some real usefulness (not demonstrated until now !), but it
> seems that we have to take some of our time to think about it.

I see no problem in answering that we prefer to postpone that
question, exactly because there are more urgent things to do than
formalizing politics.

Konrad.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr
Centre de Biophysique Moleculaire (CNRS) | Tel.: +33-2.38.25.56.24
Rue Charles Sadron                       | Fax:  +33-2.38.63.15.17
45071 Orleans Cedex 2                    | Deutsch/Esperanto/English/
France                                   | Nederlands/Francais
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------