[GAP Forum] GAP Headquarters replaced by four GAP Centres

[Steve Linton]

Dear GAP Forum,

The GAP Council and the GAP developers have agreed that status and
responsibilities of "GAP Headquarters" should be passed to an equal
collaboration of a number of " Centres", where there is permanent staff
involvement and an element of collective or organisational commitment; while
fully recognising the vital contributions of many individuals outside those
Centres.

The Centres will work together, with outside individuals, to sustain and
develop GAP, concentrating in particular on coordination and on those tasks
which are not naturally a part of anyone's research programme, but are needed
"for the general good". 

To these ends, the Centres may set up Working Groups, made up as appropriate of
Centre representatives and/or invited individuals, to perform particular tasks
and reach decisions on particular questions. At the present time (February
2005), Centres in the following places have agreed to cooperate in this way:

    * Aachen,
    * Braunschweig,
    * Fort Collins, and
    * St Andrews.

This list may change, if new Centres emerge, or existing ones withdraw.

Representatives of all the Centres can be contacted via the usual support email
address support at gap-system.org.

Some further details, including links to Centres' web sites and some of the
types of activities the Centres expect to undertake will appear on the GAP web
site shortly.

	Steve Linton
	Edmund Robertson


-- 
Steve Linton	School of Computer Science  &
      Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra
	     University of St Andrews 	 Tel   +44 (1334) 463269
http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~sal	 Fax   +44 (1334) 463278