[Fsatom-comm] New committee ; mailing lists

[Xavier Gonze]

Dear committee members,

I am glad to see that many things are shaping up !
I would like to have your advice for two things ...

1) The managing committee :
  (First, welcome to the new members : Peter and Alberto)
  As discussed at the CECAM workshop, the committee has
  two new members. We discussed also the possibility
  to include one additional person, who would be a well-known
  quantum chemist. Indeed, most quantum chemistry softwares
  are proprietary, while quantum chemistry is clearly an important
  topics for us. At the workshop, we had the chance to have
  Mark Gordon, the main developer of GAMESS (US).
  GAMESS is a very widely used Quantym Chemistry package, with
  about 10 000 address on the mailing list. The GAMESS
  licence does not grant the four freedoms, unfortunately.
  Indeed, while the sources are available free, and can be modified,
  the redistribution of modified versions should be done through
  the developer group (for testing). Non-modified versions
  of GAMESS might be redistributed freely, if I understand correctly.
  During the committee meeting, it was convened that I should
  ask Mark to suggest names of persons who might be interested
  to join us.
  I did this Wednesday, in the first break. He told me that :
  - the NWChem people might be interested (they belong to a federal
   lab, and deliver their software under GPL)
  - he sees some other persons (not many, though) that might be
   interested, but actually, he feels himself
   very interested by our ideas, and would like to join ...

  So, what shall we do ?? To summarize :
  - GAMESS is NOT a free software, but "nearly" so
  - it is one of the leading quantum Chemistry packages
  - we know Mark Gordon, and he says to be very interested
  Do we invite Mark Gordon to the committee ? Do we invite somebody else ?

  Your thoughts ???

2) There was a sudden increase in the main mailing list traffic,
  in the past few days. Also several new people subscribed ...
  and, unfortunately, several people unsubscribed. The origin of the
  subscription is not hard to find : these are people that have participated
  to the workshop and tutorial. The origin of the unsubscribe
  is also not hard to find : the traffic volume has changed from
  low to high. During the workshop, I remember discussing the
  creation of another mailing list (was it at the committee meeting ?),
  to be called fsatom-forum. This list has been created by Miguel,
  yesterday. This would be our high-traffic list (and people weakly
  interested by general discussions would not be registered).
  The fsatom list would remain low traffic, for those weakly interested
  people (I think we need a low traffic mailing list, with a large number
  of registered people, in order to reach them easily).

  Nobody is yet registered on the fsatom-forum. We have to initialize it.
  There are two possibilities : everybody from the fsatom list
  can be registered ; or on the contrary, we ask people from the
  fsatom list to register on fsatom-forum.

  Your thoughts ???

Best regards,
Xavier