[asac] Liaisons

[Richard Hills]

Dear ASAC,

I did discuss this with my colleagues in Chile after the last telecon 
and I am sorry that it has taken so long to get back to you to explain 
the outcome, but I have been distracted by a family problem.

I fear that all this is not quite as straight-forward as we imagined 
during the telecon.  As you know ALMA is subjected to a great deal of 
review and oversight - there is the Annual External Review (which is 
presently carrying out a 6-month check-up to fill any gaps) as well as 
the various panels looking at specific areas and of course any number of 
reviews of individual subsystems and components.  The role of ASAC is to 
provide advice to the Board and the Project on *scientific* matters.  It 
is absolutely right that the committee needs to be well informed about 
the state of the project in order to be able to give such advice, but we 
do need to be careful that the quest for such information does not turn 
into another layer of oversight on the day to day running of the project.
The feeling was that proposed liaison mechanism was going too far down 
this road.  So the suggestion is that we proceed along the following 
lines:

As far as the Commissioning is concerned ASAC nominates some additional 
members to "standing" review panel - presently Bob Wilson, Nario Kuno, 
Peter Schilke and Melvyn Wright.  I would suggest one more from each of 
the partners.  At the moment this meets by telecon (14:00 UTC on the 
third Friday of each month) and will have a face to face meeting on 
8/9th Oct here in Chile.

For the "Operations Preparations" there is a similar small panel channel 
chaired by George Helou which will be meeting on 11th and 12th Oct. 
Again I suggest that ASAC nominates three additional members, one from 
each partner, to that.  Please talk to Lars-Ake about the details of 
that.  He will be able to provide the links to give information about 
the current activities.

I also think that it is a good idea to have an ASAC member identified as 
the laison to each of the ARC's.  Obviously that needs to be discussed 
with the ARC managers and I haven't had a chance to tell them about this 
yet.

For the other areas, which are more focussed on particular parts of the 
system, the suggestion is that we will continue to provide you with the 
monthly reports, which do in fact contain a great deal of detail about 
progress and problems in all areas.  If you have questions or want to 
follow up on specific topics then we will be happy to respond, but we 
would like to route this through people who have the full picture, 
rather than bothering the front-line managers, engineers and scientists. 
  So please send these requests to me in the case of construction and 
technical items and to Lars-Ake if they relate to operations, 
user-interactions, etc.

The latest reports are at
http://www.alma.cl/~science/docs/10_Management/Monthly_reports/ALMA%20Report%202010%2003.pdf
http://www.alma.cl/~science/docs/10_Management/Monthly_reports/ALMA%20Report%202010%2004.pdf

I hope that this message will not get you, the ASAC members, too upset. 
  Having been on lots of such bodies myself, I know only too well that 
the thing that really makes external committees frustrated is the 
feeling that they are being kept in the dark.  I hope that you can 
accept that what is proposed here is a reasonable balance between making 
sure that you really are fully informed while enabling the management to 
get on with the day to day running the Project, for which of course they 
are accountable to the Board.

Best Richard

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Richard Hills                Phone: +56 2 467 6175
ALMA Project Scientist       Fax:   +56 2 467 6104
Av El Golf 40, Piso 18       Apmnt: +56 2 474 1642
Santiago, Chile              Mobile +56 97 608 1582
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