This is an old revision of the document!
Rather than force everyone to use one tool, we wanted to have a few where each one has some unique advantage.
Our wiki is for Snowmass to communicate with you. It serves as a jumping-off point and “one-stop shopping” to get to more detailed information. We keep calendars and useful Snowmass-wide information there. Conveners and organizers can write to it. You can see it is divided into pages for all of Snowmass and pages for each frontier. The Frontier Conveners are making the overall structure of their wiki pages the same, but they will diverge as needed.
For the registration, you need a security word. You can get this security word from the frontier conveners, or wiki admins.
Slack is primarily for discussions and real-time communication. It can be used for a lot more but we plan for this to be the main use. We will make announcements for the entire community there as well as email.
Indico is for talks, meetings, etc. Most of us know how to use it. To access Fermilab Indico you need a Fermilab services account: FNAL Services Account
Doc-db is a database system for documents including PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, a CAD drawing, or a tarball of a directory. Doc-db has a versioning system and anyone can read them. To write to doc-db, you need a Fermilab Service Account: you can request an account: FNAL Services Account . If you have one already, ask us and we'll give you edit privileges.
Very long form with details:
1. The wiki at https://snowmass21.org is for Snowmass to communicate with you. It serves as a jumping-off point and “one-stop shopping” to get to more detailed information. We keep calendars and useful Snowmass-wide information there. Conveners can write to it. The wiki has three levels: all Snowmass, each Frontier, and each Topical Group within a Frontier. The Frontier Conveners are making the overall structure of their wiki pages the same to the extent possible, but they will diverge as needed. Each topical group gets a page within the Frontier. If your conveners want you to be able to edit topical group pages we can set that up.
We would like topical and frontier conveners to do two things on the wiki: (a) any meeting that is likely to be of interest outside your Topical Group or Frontier should go on your Frontier wiki calendar – then other Topical Groups in your Frontier will know about them. The liaisons from other Frontiers are then responsible for checking these calendars and sharing the knowledge; (b) minutes of these meetings should go on the wiki as well.
2. Slack is meant to be used for conversations and chats. We will also make general announcements there on the “general” channel. Slack is not designed for calendars or anything we need to keep and be able to easily find, so please (a) save important information and conclusions on Slack to the wiki, and (b) add significant meetings to the wiki calendars. These steps will share useful information with people not on your channel.
3. And of course there is email. We promise to keep this to a minimum, so if you get an email it’s a real announcement everyone should know about.
4. Indico has many of the same functionalities as other systems but is really designed to organize meetings. The Indico sites should be linked from the wiki calendar. Many of us will use Indico and it does have a lot of functionality, but if you use it to replace the wiki then we lose uniformity among Frontiers and Topical Groups.
5. We need a way to save presentations and other documents. Doc-db is designed for that. It’s a little work to use but it is already set up and divided into topics (which we can change). Indico can link to presentations saved in doc-db so we ask that you put presentations in doc-db and then link to them in Indico. In general, LOIs and anything we might want to have long-term will be stored there in an organized way. If you ask us to save something, we can do that. For example, the wiki is backed up to doc-db on a regular basis, and doc-db is maintained and backed up by Fermilab.
None of this stops you from making Google docs, calendars, etc., but we hope you use the above as designed for uniformity among topical groups and Frontiers, so everyone knows where and how to find information.