Here is the first announcement (based on Francesco's email dated on Feb.6, 2006):

After several discussions we converged to have our USAtlas workshop on the LAr R&D activities in Dallas, SMU on March 30th and 31st (Thu and Fri respectively).

Since the proposal we submitted last summer to the USAtlas management has been accepted favorably and funds have been granted for this FY, it is a very good opportunity to convene among us and discuss the status of all our different R&D programs, prepare and start planning the activities for the next years, verify the coherency of our interests and researches within the USAtlas and in a wider scope LARG and Atlas communities so that new collaborations can actually start up in a proficient way for us and hopefully for them also.

Few of our European colleagues as well as few our LARG management kindly agree to either attend personally or to connect by video and/ or phone to participate to the discussions and possibly feedback us with suggestions.

As you can imagine this is just the first announcement of the workshop dates and place.  Lots of work is ahead of us now. The program will let us revise and discuss in - I hope - significant details the different R&D activities we expressed interests in the USAtlas community so far. We will benefit of the valuable presence of some of our friends and colleagues outside our community to also understand their interests and the possibility of collaborating together.

Of course as of today nothing is really defined and we will spend the next few weeks to define more precisely the program and an agenda. 

More e-mails will follow as the work and the organization will progress.

If you have any suggestion please feel free to let me know.

The meeting will be organized as a series of presentations and sessions of discussions. The presentations will be posted on the CERN agenda maker for which an "empty" event has been already setup at the following URL (bookmark it!):
http://agenda.cern.ch/fullAgenda.php?ida=a06978
Video/phone connections as well as a website hosted on the SMU computers will be arranged and made available.

I want here to thank on everybody's behalf Jingbo and Ryszard for their kind availability in organizing this event and for the excellent work - I'm sure - they will accomplish.

Best Regards,
Francesco