Herein you may find several messages describing the mindset of people working on TASS. It might help to read these if you have questions about "politics" in the group.
I have put up a "news" bulletin on the sci.astro groups and this has attracted a lot of new people. Welcome. You probably wonder how this effort is organized. Technically we have "laissez faire" management. This means we all talk a lot about what we might do. When there seems to be agreement on something, then a volunteer appears and says "I will do this thing."
An example of this at work is when Michael Richmond created a home page on the www. He just did it. We should all feel free to send him appropriate stuff to put there.
You may also wonder how it is financed. It is coming out of my pocket. I am trying to carry on a "gentleman scientist" tradition that goes way back in astronomy. I am not rich. It is just that I prefer to drive an old Toyota and do this work rather than drive a fancy car that I might otherwise afford. Several others have already made significant contributions. These just help us do more.
It is still a little early for any of you to try to do anything other than think about the possible problems. But soon I will have hardware, and then there will be real jobs to do.
The risk in this type of organization is that you will put a lot of work into something that no one wants to use. So it is your reponsibility to outline what you are undertaking to the group. Don't expect to ever get a consensus. There will always be non-workers who will say they have a better way of doing anything. The test will come when there is real data to process. Some will find their code is popular. Others will find their code goes unused.
I will certainly tend to support (i.e. with hardware) those who agree with my way of doing things. But I will also try to support those who have a different approach. In any case I do not feel that I "own" this group.
Tom Droege
One of our members got what might be a commercial query. I sent him the following policy statement. Of course this is just "my" policy statement, and as such is just my vote. Everyone is free to have their own version. It is quite acceptable to me to have list members who are commercial, amateur, academic, etc..
The general rule is that any tass member can speak for tass. Since there are no membership requirements this means that anyone can speak for tass. On the other hand, since no one controls tass, the only way to get tass to actually do anything is to persuade the list somehow that some of them should do the thing.
It is my intent to put the tass electronic designs in the public domain. I hope also that the software writers will choose to put the software into something like the GNU license.
Tom Droege
This seems like a good time to point out to everyone something about my philosophy for tass. Others may have their philosophy. There is no official tass policy on anything.
We are running a science project in real time and wide open. Our data is there for anyone to see, with all it's warts exposed. I have been at talks by PhD candidates where the student could not do a proper analysis of the data because the group taking it would not release the pertinent factors until they had gotten their publications out of it. That is not the way I want to operate.
Being open has it's risks. We will surely be accused of "publishing" bad data. When we actually do publish, I hope our data will be very good. It will certainly be studied as carefully as I know how.
Here on the tass mail list one is looking at the inner workings of an experimental group. The data is just what it is on any one day. Nothing on the mail list has our "reputations" behind it. We are free to say "woops" at any time without penalty.
If anyone comes and looks at what is here, they are "in" the group. So they cannot be "mislead" by "bad" data. Saying this, I welcome all to come look at what we have here. If you grab some object off a list and go look at it and find something wonderful, then as near as I can tell it is your object to claim. Good manners would have you reference TASS and the appropriate workers in your publication.
Tom Droege