The 7th RHESSI General Science Workshop will take place at the University of California, Santa Cruz, June 25-29, 2007.
This is the seventh RHESSI workshop, and we have come a long way from the early discussions at the first workshop in Berkeley in October 2002. At the last workshop in Meudon, it was agreed that the significant and sustained advances in knowledge that have been acquired through the analysis and interpretation of RHESSI and other data warrant the publication of a workshop proceedings monograph, and the editors of Space Science Reviews have agreed to publish such a monograph as a special issue.
While much of the information presented at the RHESSI workshops has appeared, or will appear, in the refereed literature, the idea behind writing a monograph is to assemble the knowledge we have gained into a coherent narrative that is greater than the sum of these previously published parts. The monograph should connect, link, and consolidate the information we have gained into a more holistic description of the phenomena under study. The books from the Skylab workshop series on Solar Active Regions (Orrall) and Solar Flares (Sturrock) are excellent models for what we have in mind.
Building on the very successful team structure at the workshops, each team will contribute a chapter (or possibly several chapters) to the monograph. We are in the process of assembling a Table of Contents with a list of topics that should be covered in the different chapters. A team member (or members) will have the responsibility for writing a few pages on each topic, with the goal of not only summarizing information that can be found in the literature, but also linking it to the workshop proceedings as a whole.
Clearly, this exercise will require some iteration. As a first step, we ask that each team leader solicit team members to draft contributions for each of the topics identified in the Table of Contents, and then assemble them into a first draft for the Chapter. The team leaders and the workshop organizing committee will meet on Monday, June 25, to establish what remaining progress in the various chapters is needed and how best to proceed. During the next three days of the workshop, in addition to the normal presentations and discussions of new results, each team should make a concentrated effort to produce a more refined draft of the team chapters. In other words, we anticipate that this will be a real writing workshop. We hope that the workshop participants will enthusiastically participate in this important endeavor, and that very substantial progress will be reported at the plenary session on Friday. We would anticipate that a complete draft of the monograph will be ready to be submitted to Space Science Reviews within 6 months after the workshop.
Brian Dennis
Gordon Emslie
Bob Lin
