web, communcations, infrastructure - scope

[Rick (RocketScience) Kwan]

In the last few weeks, we seem to be slowly picking up some steam on
working on the website again. Actually, the scope is getting a bit
more generalized. It now includes:
* the website (www.aiaa-sf.org)
* meeting reservation system -- unifying the original on-line
reservation system with PayPal payment option
* e-mail updates and management of mailing lists
* the newsletter, even if it is primarily just PDF form, possibly
using LaTeX has the new composition system

There is a general goal of making web content easy to update by
members of the AIAA SF council and other related volunteers.

I will admit a bias toward Python for some of the tools. The reasons
are: (1) it is proven as a language for writing web applications, and
(2) there is a strong movement in the computational science community
to use Python to drive their computational tools.

There was some discussion yesterday as well of using OpenOffice Writer
as an alternative to Word for some composition work.

We still need to get down to specifics of what the goals and tasks are.