Dear all,
A few of the astronomers associated with the Apps WG have been discussing the possibility of a newsletter about VO Applications that would communicate short news items about advances in VO tools to astronomers.
Many of the new capabilities that are announced on the Apps mailing list, or shown at the Apps sessions at interop meetings would be immediately useful for astronomers. The idea is to make this news available to astronomers with a short and sweet newsletter, designed to be attention catching, and quick to absorb. e.g. 'VO can be accessed by powerful command line tools, here's one example', 'New great tool released, here's the link' 'Large data sets can be stored in and accessed from VOSpace, here's where...'.
We've put together a draft in order to explore the ideas of what sort of content or format such a newsletter might involve. This is attached as a pdf file (that includes http links), where the articles are a mix of real articles and ideas for sections. The articles are intentionally short and not as detailed as say a project newsletter (e.g. NVO newsletter) would be.
We've had some discussion on how such a newsletter might be managed - 2 or 3 issues per year, rotating editors assigned by chair of Apps, editing contributed articles for astronomer audience, possible different delivery formats (pdf, email, html..). Also in discussing the scope, we were quite clear about not trying to make an overall IVOA newsletter, and to target astronomers. As such it would be a 'VO Applications Newsletter' rather than a newsletter of the Applications WG if I can make that distinction.
This is all at the 'ideas' stage, and with just a few days before the Trieste meeting I'd like hear any first impressions or input the Apps group might have on this. I plan to bring it up at the Trieste meeting. Also there may be some discussion about IVOA newsletters as a result of IVOA Assessment Committee report, so it would also need to be considered with respect to that too.
best regards,
Mark Allen