Dear Participants of the NIC IX Satellite Workshop on Data Needs in Nuclear Astrophysics, other nuclear astrophysicists interested in the topic, and potential members of the future working group, I have today two items which might be of general interest: I. a summary of the discussions and conclusions of the Basel workshop II. a possible suggestion for a first (extended) working group meeting, triggered by my attendence of the ECT* Trento Meeting of the Board of Directors last Tuesday I. the topics covered in the Basel workshop covered essentially areas of (a) required nuclear input for the modeling of stellar evolution and explosions, i.e. 1. reaction rates, 2. masses, 3. beta-decay half-lives, 4. fission properties, 5. electron/positron and neutrino interactions with nuclei and nucleons, 6. the nuclear equation of state, (b) abundances yields from stellar evolution and explosions, and (c) observational abundance data from low metallicity stars. In our discussion we divided these topics into essentially three categories: (i) a category, where the collection of existing data would be sufficient, partially because there are only one or two groups around providing them and an additional evaluation would not be feasable. However, it would in any case be helpful if these groups make their data/compilations publicly available, preferentially on a common website, and are willing to interact with the community and respond to whishes making their data/compilations available in the most userfriendly way. Areas fitting into this category are: - electron/positron and neutrino interactions with nuclei and nucleons, - the nuclear equation of state, - maybe the purely theoretical predictions of reaction rates for heavier compound nuclei with high densities of excited states, including neutron- and neutrino-induced fission as well as beta-delayed fission (but see also the discussion in (iii). (ii) a category, where we have the feeling that other communities already do a good job (or where this job extends beyond the purely nuclear astrophysics community) and one should either not multiply efforts or possibly misses expertise to do so. The optical opacities for stellar modeling for example were never touched by the nuclear astrophysics community. Other topics fitting into this category are - nuclear masses, an area being taken care of very well by Georges Audi, with a commitment going at least up to 2008 for providing one more release of mass evaluations - possibly the abundance compilations of stars might come in here, which is not at the very core of "nuclear" astrophysics, although extremely important, and where adjacent communities should feed in as well. The abundances from gamma-ray observations in supernovae remnants and the interstellar medium, abundances from X-ray observations in supernovae remnants, the interstellar and inter-cluster medium (the latter in clusters of galaxies), abundances from radio-observations are additional "data needs" for the stellar and galaxy modelers. Maybe our community can initiate such an inter-disciplinary interaction, but it clearly goes beyond the "narrow" nuclear astrophysics interpretation. Maybe people like Tim Beers (with his low metallicity stellar library) and Roland Diehl (centered around gamma-rays) can be the seeds for such an effort (I had a talk with Roland Diehl around this issue in Geneva), - probably abundance yields from massive and intermediate mass stars for the chemical evolution of galaxies can already be discussed, but they are still far from an industry standard. If efforts are initiated here, they should probably come from stellar modelers. (iii) the category clearly set up for "evaluations". This would be along the very tradition of Caughlan, Fowler and collaborators: - evaluations of experimental data for nuclear reactions, along the lines of Caughlan and Fowler, NACRE (Angulo et al.), the big bang evaluation (Descouvement et al.), an evaluation touching on explosive hydrogen burning and more (Iliadis et al. 2001), etc. etc including recent JINA and Livermore efforts.... - what about beta-decay half-lives, experimental and extensions into theory far from stability? In the latter, there is a whole bunch of compilations (publicly and not publicly availabe) on the market, e.g. a bunch of things initiated by Klapdor (e.g. Staudt et al., Hirsch et al.), stuff originating from Peter Moeller's strength functions (Kratz, Moeller, Nix 1997 and follow ups), more microscopic (but up to now only spherical approaches) by Borzov and Goriely..... On the one hand it would be good to agree on the available experimental data, on the other hand it would be good to have people look at the (combined) influence of strength functions and mass models and perform tests on prediction quality as done by Lunney in RMP for masses. - what about statistical model approaches? There are at present essentially only two groups focussing on this for astrophysical applications (around Stephane Goriely and Tommy Rauscher, going both back to the SMOKER code by Thielemann, Arnould and Truran; earlier efforts went back to Woosley, Fowler, Holmes and Zimmerman and Truran, Cammeron and Hansen), but it might not be bad to make judgements on the quality. While a statistical model code is an absolutely clear mathematical description (not less and not more, and one might wonder if there could be differences at all if correctly implemented), the difference is in the nuclear physics ingredients (optical potentials, level densities, gamma-widths via E1/M1, E2 giant resonance distributions - including deformations and pigmy resonances due to extended neutron skins; the more micro-macro approaches derive many of the important parameters from mass models, the fully microscopic approaches from Skyrme forces). In either case these are parameter fits with uncertainties when extending them to nuclei far from stability. Probably one has to judge the "micro"-applicability also on the accuracy obtained for mass and other ground state predictions far from stability. I hope this summary reflects somehow the discussions we had in Basel (and another lunch meeting at NIC in Geneva following up on these issues), which ended with the conclusion that a working group should be established, dealing with all of these issues but concentrating on the topics listed under (iii) and there mostly on issues one and probably two. Hendrik Schatz was elected as head of the working group with the duty to recruit further (obvious) members, going also beyond the Basel participants and requiring extensions e.g. into the Japanese community. The idea was that this working group is not necessarily doing the job of the evaluations itself, but points out obvious needs, encourages subgroups to specific evaluations, initiates in this way releases and updates on regular intervals (with a given quality approval) and acts in this way as a steering body for an overall effort which has similarity to the open software scene (parts are provided by individuals and subgroups but they match the overall framework set by the whole community). II. The ECT* in Trento (www.ect.it) will run in the period of March to May 2007 a three months school for graduate students (doctoral training program) on the topic: Nuclear Structure and Nuclear Reactions. Except for a two to three weeks break, there will be about 90min lectures every working day by external lecturers coming typically for one week each. During that school there exists the opportunity to run in parallel workshops or "collaboration" meetings on related issues. While we had a lot of proposals for workshops already, and had to decline some of them, there is still open room for "collaboration" meetings of about 20 participants. This might give the chance to start really acting and form the core working group. These meetings are partially subsidized by ECT* (about 1/2 of the local costs) and it provides an enjoyable and pleasant working atmosphere in an old (remodeled) villa in a nice countryside and historical old town with office space and computer access for all participants. You might remember the workshop run by Carmen Angulo a few years back within the EU Carina program. If there is a general agreement that this is a good idea, we would need a formal proposal (just a couple of pages), discussing the ideas behind the meeting, giving a list of likely participants (of the order 20 or so), plus making a suggestion for the best dates (possibly the week when Karlheinz Langanke will lecture on nuclear astrophysics is a good time, but the dates are not set yet and an overlap with other lecturers might be there as well). The main proposer should maybe be European (Carmen??) with probably a co-proposer from the strong JINA effort (Hendrik or Michael??). The proposal would have to be submitted to ECT* in Trento before the next Bord Meeting on October 17, best about a week before that date. Please think about it. The best would be to respond to Hendrik, the leader of the working group. All the best Friedel ps. let me also thank at this point all the graduate students and postdocs who ran at the Basel meeting the registration, the coffee breaks, the posters (Iris Dillmann, Tobias Fischer, Carla Froehlich, Stuart Whitehouse), especially Raphael Hirschi (for running the webpage, the computer access and many other things), my collegues (Eva Grebel, Matthias Liebendoerfer and Tommy Rauscher), who went along with my crazy ideas and had good advice, and especially JINA for sponsoring this activity.