Meeting in March

[Gregor Hagedorn]

Dear colleagues,

Please excuse again the delay. I was away since Tuesday of last week
and failed doing this before leaving.

1. Nicolas Bailly was very kind to offer the possibility of an
additional "European" meeting in Paris in conjunction with another
meeting. However, except for Nicolas, perhaps Yde de Jong, and me, we
have no participants, so we will not hold that meeting and hope to
meet at the TDWG meeting in autumn.

2. For the Australian meeting 13/14 March seems to be ok with
everbody.  I got 4 responses to my question regarding the Sydney vs.
Canberra question. 1 was neutral, 2 prefer Canberra, 1 prefers
Sydney. So Canberra is preferred.

However, the BioForum 2 schedule (see
http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/bioforum/index.html) is much clearer
now and I think we should meet in Sydney! Immediately after our
meeting a Workshop for an Electronic Catalogue of Names of Known
Organisms: "TOWARDS A CATALOGUE OF LIFE" will be held at the Royal
Botanic Gardens, Sydney, Australia, 15-16 March, 2002. The draft
programme is not on the web yet.

The funding decision on which my travel money depends should have
been in last week, but I haven't heard it yet. Assuming it goes
through, Sydney seems the better place, since the Catalogue of life
meeting is immediately afterwards.

Originally I had the impression that some GBIF meetings in Canberra
may be occurring before that day, but now it seems that all Canberra
is Tuesday 19th-Fri. 22th. So either we could meet in Canberra
earliest Sa/Sun 23/24th, or well ahead of Sydney and leave at least
one day travel time. As I understand, Bob has made early travel
plans, I understand he will be in Canberra 10th March.

We could meet 11-13 in Canberra, then have 1 day extra day to travel
to Sydney. That would exclude some people who may want to pop in
before the Sydney meeting, but we don't know about that, so we should
stick to our core group.

Karen Wilson has offered to provide us with a room in Sydney, I
assume Steve would do the same for Canberra.

Please answer in direct mail to g.hagedorn at bba as soon as possible:
_Will_ you come to a meeting:

Canberra 11-13   Yes/No
Canberra 12-13   Yes/No
Sydney 12-14     Yes/No
Sydney 13-14     Yes/No

I will collect all answers until tomorrow, Tuesday evening and send
the conclusion round on Wednesday morning UTC.

Gregor----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Koenigin-Luise-Str. 19          Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203

Often wrong but never in doubt!