What is a group admin anyway?
John Reekie, 15 Jun 1999

Each group has one or more "admins", who are able to configure the facilities of that group, such as its Forum, FAQ, mailing lists, and so on. A group cannot be created without an admin, and that admin is responsible for managing that group, enrolling members into that group, approving (or not) requests to join that group, and in general responding to the needs of the people in that group.

Being a group admin involves a certain amount of time involvement. Not a huge amount, because we have tried to get as much of the administrative overhead into the server code as we can. Nonetheless, it does involve some time (including, we hope, reading these FAQs!). If you don't have the bandwidth, please find someone else who you expect to be working with who does.

The other side of this coin is that group admins have the freedom to configure and manage their groups. For example, they can give collaborators accounts on this site without needing to send email to some centralized "webmaster." They can turn on many of their group's features without having to wait for us to respond. (Unfortunately, we are limited in what we can do automatically in the Web server, so turning on features that require privileged access to the server machine will send email that requires a response from a person.)

Note that some of the group admin interfaces generate things like passwords and secret keys that we need to supply to scripts that we run to add features to your group. Please use these forms if they exist -- if you just email us instead of using the web form, we have to impersonate you, fill in the form, and then read our own email!

The goal of this approach is to make the GSRC Web Site scalable. By "out-sourcing" these (simple) administrative tasks to people who are working directly on the site, we hope that the site can expand to include many users and be a productive vehicle for your research goals.