Welcome, thanks, housekeeping

[Peter Williams]

Dear colleagues,

Thank you for signing up for ATSIG, and welcome to the group! I'm looking forward to working with all of you.

We currently have 30 people signed up for the list. That's great, but I bet we can do better. If you haven't done so, it would be great if you could forward my open-invitation email to departmental or topical mailing lists as appropriate. I'm not a fan of spamming colleagues, but I do feel that there will be a fairly direct correlation between the number of people affiliated with ATSIG and the amount of influence we can have on ALMA's development efforts.

Later in the week I'll send around a summary of my current understanding of ALMA's time-domain situation, where things are going for the next cycle, etc. I'm holding off on doing so in the hopes that we can recruit a few more members before things really get rolling. One "sneak peek": here's a link to a letter to the ALMA Science Advisory Committee written by some members of the planetary science community:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2SKLrHj6pRHc3dqeGRyWS05VTA

Some of the co-authors of the letter are on this list, and I definitely hope that we can build on their efforts.

Finally, one early bit of housekeeping: Google Groups allows you to choose how much email you want to receive from the group. I've set all of your accounts to the "all email" mode, acting like a standard email list, since I've run into problems in the past where people's accounts were unknowingly set to "No email" delivery, resulting in them not seeing any group communications. If you genuinely would prefer a different delivery option, you can go and change it back at the group webpage linked in the standard email footer.

Cheers,

Peter