With MYRES, we will put the funding emphasis on support for travel and attendance costs for every participant and try to save on expenses for accommodations and conference site. We will cut overhead costs as much as possible to achieve this goal. For instance, a summer date will allow us to book college dormitories, reducing the cost of accommodations. A preliminary budget which is based on estimates we requested from several institutions in New England is given in appendix C. We will hold the first meeting in the Northeastern US to reduce travel costs for European and US researchers, but future meetings could be held at sites more convenient for a different cross-section of the community. Specifically, future MYRES meetings might alternate between an European and an Eastern US location to facilitate the cross-Atlantic exchange. To this end, we have already had a positive initial response from an European agency, the private VolkswagenStiftung foundation of Wolfsburg, Germany. If NSF funding can be allocated, we will submit specific proposals to the European Science Foundation, the VolkswagenStiftung, and the British Research Council to support European participants. A co-financing scheme between NSF and European agencies might be established eventually.
An alternative suggestion as to the place to hold MYRES is to choose an US west-coast location (e.g. UC Berkeley's C. Kerr Campus or a Washington State college), and to bring in participants from the Pacific rim, possibly with the support of Japanese funding agencies. As outlined below, each MYRES conference will be organized by two elected chairs who are responsible for setting the conference theme, organizing the workshop, inviting conveners, and publishing conference proceedings as well as evaluating the performance. By having such a rotating chairmanship we intend to maintain flexibility in terms of the subject of MYRES as well as the site location, while having institutional memory by means of a semi-permanent senior faculty advisory panel as specified in section 4.