Dear Declan,

We looked at your enquiry and concluded that this has never been a
serious problem for OPAL, perhaps because the number of possible topics
has always far exceeded the number of available students.  A few comments
follow:

1.  Although we have written guidelines for many aspects of how we run our
collaborative life, there are none for deciding how to allocate projects. 

2.  We have no policy of performing a second analysis on any channel
before publication. Projects are not assigned.  Physicists get together in
a working group and look for the interesting topics.  There are no
constraints stopping anyone from working on the same thing as anyone else. 

3. Very occasionally students in two different corners of the world end up
with theses on similar topics, but if both of them have done original work
on significant parts of the analysis there have never been problems with
passing the Ph.D. exam.  Theses are not treated as official OPAL
publications. 

4.  We do have a rule that there will normally only be one official OPAL
publication on a particular piece of data.  This has occasionally given
rise to rivalry about whose version of the analysis gets to be the main
result in the publication, but it has never reached the point of pistols
at dawn.


I hope this helps.

Yours ever

David

__________________________________________________________________________

Dear Declan,

It's not so much laissez-faire as a real grassroots democracy.  But it
works.

Thinking about it some more - as I come to the end of my year as physics
co-ordinator - the essence here is to delegate responsibility for a year
or two at a time to co-ordinators (for things that need to be got done -
like running the experiment, writing new software etc., publishing papers,
getting conference talks) and to working group conveners.  University
group leaders like myself sit on a Board which makes long term policy, but
we can only get short-term central responsibility in the experiment - as I
have now - by being chosen from the pool of possible candidates for
central tasks, i.e. all of the ambitious people, post-PhD onward.  Of
course, I have a veto on what UCL's post-docs and students commit
themselves to do, and each university group has a responsibility to keep
part of the detector going.

The working groups, the run-meeting, the offline meeting etc. are where
decisions are made on a week by week basis.

Every working group keeps a list (ideally on the web) of projects that
need effort, and any superviser bringing a student in will go to the
working group conveners to see which of these projects would suit their
needs and expertise. With the continued growth of LEP energy and
luminosity there is also a strong line of update analyses that need to be
done, and which give students a flying start.

Yours ever

David

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| David J. Miller, Physics Co-ordinator, OPAL Experiment           |
| EP Division, CERN, CH1211 Geneve, Switzerland                    |
| (Prof. of Physics, University College London)                    |
| http://home.cern.ch/m/millerdj/www/                              |
| Phone +41 22 767 8186, fax +41 22 767 9330, Home +41 22 782 2572 |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+