[Coin-announce] COIN-OR to be hosted by INFORMS; details and a new mailing list

[Robin Lougee-Heimer]

At the 2003 national meeting, the board of INFORMS unanimously agreed to
become the new host of COIN-OR in 2003.    This is a major milestone for
the COIN-OR  project, which was conceived by IBM Research as a professional
service project with the goal of being an independent community-run,
community-owned resource.   (To celebrate, we're throwing a contest, see
http://www.coin-or.org/contest.htm)

The agreement with INFORMS is that COIN-OR will pay INFORMS $1/yr, for a
trial period of three years.   This arrangement makes hosting a "fee for
service" so that the INFORMS endowment will be untouchable should COIN-OR
be sued.  But, in order to pay INFORMS the nominal hosting fee, COIN-OR
needs to establish itself as a business entity.

What exactly should that business entity be and how do we go about doing
it? Anyone interesting in volunteering time, experience, or  legal services
(!) is invited to join the coin-incorporated (for lack of a better name; I
don't know that we really need to "incorporate") mailing list at
http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/mailman/listinfo/coin-incorporated
.  The purpose of this list is to facilitate discussion among people
volunteering to create an appropriate business entity for the COIN-OR
initiatitve.   The  target completion date is Aug 2003 , so an announcement
can be made at ISMP2003 where the coin-contest winners will be announced.

Robin

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Robin Lougee-Heimer
IBM TJ Watson Research Center
ph: 914-945-3032   fax: 914-945-3434
robinlh at us.ibm.com
http://www.coin-or.org