Membership Application - Stars, Milky Way & Local Volume

Benefits of membership

By obtaining membership, the applicant acquires access to ways to communicate with other SMWLV members (access to the LSSTC slack, the community.lsst.org private channels, and the dissemination mailing list), access to any available Collaboration resources including data products, software, and developing resources if they exist, interact with the LSST Project members (starting with the Project-Collaboration liaisons), access to funding resources dedicated to the SCs when available, and support to apply for said resources.

Eligibility for membership

SMWLV places no restrictions on members’ institutional status, career stage, or LSST data rights access status. SMWLV welcomes all individuals who can make a contribution to furthering SMWLV science, as determined through the membership application process outlined below.

Membership classes

Full members
Full members are those who make an ongoing, active contribution to SMWLV efforts, ideally (but not necessarily) within a Science Working Group or ad hoc Task Force. Full members are expected (but not formally required) to commit roughly 5% of their time or more for LSST-related work, which translates to ~7 hours per month. Examples of this work might include: tackling collaboration priorities, precursor research (and/or the coordination/advising thereof), or telecons/emails/in person meetings. LSST-related research is very broadly defined as research that, when published and presented in talks, will include some reference to LSST. Full members have voting rights in the collaboration, starting one month after the commencement of their full membership.

Associate members
Associate members may have a more casual involvement in the work of SMWLV, contributing less than about 5% of their time on average (<7 hours per month) to SMWLV efforts. An example might include a member of a different science collaboration who sits on an SMWLV Task Force for a limited amount of time. Associate members will have access to all email lists as well as telecons, but will not have voting rights.
Associate Member status mainly exists to enable members whose primary membership is with another Rubin SC, to communicate fully with SMWLV members as their primary SC duties require. Associate member candidates will submit a shortened application form via the same portal as the Full Member application portal.

Application for membership

To apply to join SMWLV, applicants submit a 1-2 page Membership Plan summarizing their 2 year planned contributions, including planned milestones and/or deliverables. “Milestones” and “deliverables” may include things such as: conducting a particular LSST-related research project, presenting LSST-related work in colloquia or conferences, submission of grant or observing proposals to support LSST-related investigations, generating a simulated dataset, generating shareable code for a technical issue. In addition to the 1-2 page Membership Plan above, new applicants submit a CV with publications list, and identify at least one science Working Group to affiliate with. New applications may be submitted at any time, and will be reviewed quarterly by Collaboration chairs. We encourage new applicants to be in touch with Collaboration chairs to help with the application process. .

Special Note:

Please fill out the web form below and upload your application (and CV in one PDF if you are a new member) to our Dropbox file request.