Hi Everyone,
it's been a while since the TDWG Meeting and workshop in Perth. Many of you on this list have participated in the workshop, and it was great to meet you there. I found the workshop to be productive and very encouraging towards forming this Interest Group in a way that has unique value.
You may have noticed that we have our own TDWG wiki site at
http://wiki.tdwg.org/Phylogenetics/
You can navigate there easily manually by going to the TDWG home page (http://tdwg.org ), then click 'Wiki' in the left hand navigation bar, then 'Phylogenetics'.
I've put up already last year some minimal initial content about what we are about, and I also put up information about and notes from our Perth workshop:
http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/Phylogenetics/PhylogeneticsStandardsWork...
While there hasn't been much activity since on the charter and the BioSynC proposal due to the I guess all too familiar year-end frenzy, this will change over the next few months. Stay tuned, we'll keep you in the loop. Also, this is meant to be a discussion much more than an announcement forum, so if you have any suggestions, concerns, or thoughts, please don't hesitate to voice them here.
Speaking of keeping in the loop, I'll shortly forward a call for participation in a NESCent-organized event that is very closely aligned with the phylogenetics standards and targeted at the interoperability issues we were talking about in Perth.
As for Markus' email, I don't know to what extent you have been part of the respective discussion but I wasn't. While I see the possible benefits of better avoiding the reinventing the wheel, I find the question of merging with another and much larger community when we aren't one really yet a bit premature, and I am concerned that the loss of focus might cause some to tune out or ignore the list (more than they might otherwise), which I find the much bigger risk than reinventing as the latter can be prevented by cross-talk and subscribing to multiple lists (which I'm used to, but again maybe not everyone is).
That's just my opinion though - please don't hesitate to voice yours, especially if you feel differently.
Cheers,
-hilmar