Section clarifying how our science cases will be used by the LSST Project

[fedhere]

It would be very helpful to make extremely obvious and transparent the (current) plan to evaluate the science cases and metric to ultimately decide on a survey strategy.
This would help convincing people to get involved as its crucial to know what the rules and objective of a game are as one starts playing.

This in practice entails edits to chapter 2.

[drphilmarshall]

Thanks @fedhere ! There was much talk in Tucson about a "project section" explaining how our science cases will be used by the PST and SAC. I think this needs to go in Chapter 1, and also be referred to by a "Foreword from the Project" . I will make space for these, and then work with @michaelstrauss to make sure we are transmitting the words of the director and the PST accurately.

[bethwillman]

Dear Fed -

Thank you for making this important point - This issue was also discussed
at the Science Advisory Committee meeting in August, and the Project has
received a recommendation from our SAC to provide something along these
lines. I agree 100% that its important to clarify these questions to the
community, to the extent that is now possible.

The radio silence on this for the last month is, in part, because the key
Project members that would work on this have been underwater with
Commissioning and Operations planning, other subsystem planning activities,
and upcoming reviews. I'm dropping this line now to let everyone know that
this is definitely on our radar, and we will be working with the SAC and
PST on it.

Cheers
Beth

[drphilmarshall]

Hi @bethwillman , @connolly

How's it going with thinking through how the findings in the Observing Strategy white paper will be taken forward and used by the project? Beth and I talked yesterday about how both the timeline and the policy / mechanism are important. I guess the timeline need not be too fine-grained, it would just be good to know roughly when decisions about eg the year 1 and 2 baseline schedule will be taken. Regarding the policy / mechanism, I guess the SAC will have some input here, as our usual intermediary between the science community and the project. It'd be interesting to hear more about where you are heading with that.

To help out, I took a look at the introduction, and found a place for this section: I think it belongs after "1.2 Evaluating and Optimizing the LSST Observing Strategy" in a subsection called "1.3 Influencing the LSST Observing Schedule" (or something) - and that this subsection could contain the 10 questions template as well, to show the material that will be focused on. I'll implement this so we can see what it looks like.

Thanks!

Phil