IMS Groups

IMS Group Web Pages

IMS Group Mailing Lists

Invitation to Form an IMS Group

This is an invitation from IMS to the organizers of various groups of people with interests related to probability and statistics, to register their group as an IMS Group. The IMS Groups Program is intended to promote professional communication amongst groups of scholars with common interests, which might be region-specific, subject-specific, or both, or otherwise defined. The groups should be largely self-organizing within a simple administrative framework provided by IMS. The structure is intended to parallel that of Yahoo Groups and Google Groups and to provide similar functionality for participants, including management of email lists and hosting of suitable web pages.

IMS Group registration is at no cost. There will be zero cash flow between IMS and IMS Groups apart from what is involved in regular membership of IMS by individuals associated with the group. The intention of the program is to facilitate self-organization of existing informal groups, and to provide information services to such groups with a minimum of administrative overhead both for IMS and the group.

Services provided by IMS to an IMS Group

IMS will provide technical support for the any of the following services which may be desired by the group:

  • a group email list (IMS will take all reasonable precautions to protect the privacy of such lists, and will not make them available to other parties)
  • web archiving of messages to a group email list
  • web hosting of suitably structured documents such as conference announcements and job advertisements
  • links from the IMS website to web pages maintained by group organizers or group members
  • for groups hosting an open access electronic journal of suitable quality, an agreement to list the journal on the IMS website as an IMS affiliated journal

The list of all IMS Groups and their coordinators and purposes will be provided on the IMS Website, with suitable classification by geography, group interest, and perhaps other attributes.

Service provided by an IMS Group to IMS

IMS expects group coordinators to encourage participating individuals, and associated departments and formal research groups, to become members of IMS, and to enlarge the group whenever possible to include others sharing the interest of the group. IMS expects to be acknowledged as a supporter of the group in conference announcements or similar communications made by the group, with a link to the IMS website provided on any website created by the Group. IMS also expects coordinators to allow all email messages to the list related to IMS Group services to carry a brief footer text to be provided from time to time by IMS which might indicate the activity of the group was supported by IMS, with a link the the IMS website, or provide advertisement of programs or services offered by IMS.

To avoid spamming, IMS would not expect to distribute broadcast messages through the regional group lists. Rather, group list recipients would be reminded from time to time how to subscribe to the IMS e-bulletin.

Please see https://www.imstat.org/ims-groups/set-up-details/ for details of how to set up an IMS Group.