Welcome to new members, planning

[Christian Wittern]

Dear Council members,

It is my pleasure to welcome the newly elected members Edward
Vanhoutte and Natasha Smith to the Council and this list.  Although
their term will not start until the beginning of next year, I asked
Daniel Pitti (who add maintains this list) to add them right away,
since we will need to start doing the planning for next year.  Daniel
suggested the new members send a message to this list to verify they
can post; as with many listservs nowaday, only the subscribed mail
alias is allowed for posting.

As many of you will now, we had a very productive and in fact exciting
meeting in Nancy.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank on
behalf of the Council Laurent Romary and his team in Nancy for hosting
such a splendid meeting.  I for one thoroughly enjoyed the hospitality
and thoughtful arrangements.  It will be quite a challenge for the
next host to live up to such a precedent.

Those who have been in Nancy will also be aware of the fact, that the
Editors announced a pre-release version of P5 to be available for
public review by March 2004.  This puts us on quite an aggressive time
scale for next year, but I think we could and should aim at a release
in time for the next members meeting.  (If you think this is too
ambitious, please speak up right now!).

There are of course still many open ends that needs to be fixed for
this.  To provide for discussion and work on this, I would like to
have a conference call in January and March and a face to face meeting
in May (location to be determined, suggestions welcome).  So far, we
have been successful with scheduling the calls on Tuesdays at 1300
GMT.  I would therefore like to see if we can have it on January 20th,
2004 or a week later on the 27th.

I would like to ask the workgroups to present their progress reports
at that call.  It would be helpful if you could also include a list of
items that needs to be resolved for P5 and a work schedule for that.

All the best,

Christian Wittern

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 Christian Wittern 
 Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
 47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN