We have initiated this mailing list to progress the development of the 
founding of the OpenTox Association. Further materials, discussion and 
announcements with regards to founding will be shared to this list.

I summarise briefly here some history so far and will then send current 
documentation I have prepared.

The origins of the association stem from the development of a community 
around the concepts and applications associated with OpenTox. The 
initial FP7 funded OpenTox project ran from 2008 - 2011 but activities 
did not end with the project. Further related projects, meetings and 
activities continued. However there has been a lack of organised 
structure and funding for supporting activities and maintaining and 
updating resources. There currently is no formal framework supporting 
sustainability goals, funding or structure for decision-making or 
accepting responsibility. Furthermore, there is a more general 
sustainability absence from research projects in this field; as an 
example, data and reference information created from projects is often 
just not maintained or made available in a useful way, beyond the end of 
projects. After participating in numerous such discussions over the last 
couple of years, I became more convinced that it would be worthwhile to 
make advances on solving such problems. As community is a key foundation 
of our mental model and advances, a non-profit association appeared to 
provide one useful pillar. Various discussions in recent months and 
weeks confirmed significant support for the idea, and we drafted a set 
of articles and had a founding discussion meeting 16 January 2015. This 
meeting provided a simple result: there was a strong consensus that the 
association was worth advancing, and we should work further on it, in 
particular to review, discuss and complete the articles. Based on these 
discussions I worked on putting in place a farily simple process for 
doing this, updated the articles, and gathered and respond to comments 
so far.

I will post the results, i.e., the existing materials, process, meeting 
agenda etc. in my next email (s).

best regards
Barry


Barry Hardy
Douglas Connect GmbH
Baermeggenweg 14
4314 Zeiningen
Switzerland

Tel: +41 79 755 2340
Skype: barryhardy