[alma_na] Re: [mmawkrpt]ALMA Progress Report List Updated and Current Report

[Larry D'Addario]

Janet and everyone,

IMHO, the weekly reports have become practically useless due to
changes in procedure that have been instituted over the past year or
so.  

Previously, the full text of the reports was sent by email to all
subscribers.  It was provided as plain ASCII in the body of the email,
not as an attachment and not encoded in HTML or any other language.
The resulting emails were relatively short, and the text was
immediately accessible to the recipient.  For awhile, the text was
being supplied only via a link into ALMAEDM.  (Not a direct link, but
one of the very long strings that is actually a command to a program
running in ALMAEDM; thus, the actual location of the file is not
contained in the link.)  Even then, the file itself was not plain
ASCII but rather a word processor file or PDF file.  More recently,
the reports have sometimes been distributed as attachements to email.

Simpler is better, and far more effective.  The reports are
intrinsically just plain text, and there is no need to "process" them
into fancy fonts.  They should be maintained in ASCII (.txt) files,
and distributed in the body of emails to those who wish to subscribe.

Another problem is the consolidation of the two lists (mmawkprog and
mmawkrpt) into one.  Under the previous system, nearly everyone
working on the project would get an automated request for a report
every Thursday by using one of these lists, and then the compiled
reports would be distributed the following Monday to the other list.
That was a good arrangement because it enabled people to subscribe
even though they are not contributors, and it enables those who are
solicited as contributors to unsubscribe if they don't want to read
about everybody else's work each week.  The "request" list should be
maintained by the management, but the "distribution" list should allow
individuals to subscribe or unsubscribe as they wish.

An improvement to the previous system would be to send the report
requests on Friday, not Thursday.  Often, by the time the week is over
and a report might be written, the request has been forgotten.

--Larry

=====================================================================
Larry R. D'Addario
Research Engineer
National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Addresses   (EMAIL)    ldaddario at nrao.edu
	    (PHONE)    +1/520/882-8250x123, office; 520/885-8240 home
	    (FAX)      +1/520/882-7955
	    (MAIL)     949 N Cherry Ave, Tucson, AZ 85721-0655, USA.
=====================================================================