Comment: I think a symposium, workshop, or edited volume on anthropometric methods would be more likely to attract experts because it has a finite scope and it's an event that is recognized and rewarded by most employers inside and outside academia.

Reply from BrianSherwoodJones My answer is - it's a sort of experiment. You may well be right. I don't know. I offer the following reasons for trying it.

1. the world is changing and new methods of communication might work; email is a 'killer app' everyone depends on it but this sort of multi-way conversation is handled much better by a wiki than email; getting people off email will be quite a job.
2. getting people - especially non-academics - to attend events has become much harder in the UK. I don't know about the US.
3. there are people who contribute to edited volumes but they are also getting rarer.
4. The cfp for next year's ergonomics society conference closes 12th August. A whole session or workshop on anthropometric methods would need to be in a decent shape well before then. The timescales (and cost) of real world collaboration are getting harder to accommodate.
5. the idea was to get people writing standards to find out what their users needed. this would overlap with sorting out the dangerously ignorant but not much. 1 adding it to the MarESIG experiment was close to free so if it doesn't work and I/we find out why then there is a nett gain.

There are some success stories - testimonials from real life situations follow:

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TWikiSuccessStoryOfAstroGrid

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TWikiSuccessStoryOfCmed

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TWikiSuccessStoryOfDisney

More below. http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TWikiSuccessStories

-- BrianSherwoodJones - 06 Jul 2005
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