@This recommendation was immediately endorsed at the joint ICFA/ILCSC meeting held in Beijing. Now, a large number of high-energy physicists, accelerator scientists and engineers are actively exploring the path towards rapid development of a conceptual design of ILC, a linear collider, to be realized through a world-@collaboration. It has been announced by now, in order to facilitate the world-wide formation of an international design team of a linear collider, KEK will be hosting the "First ILC Workshop", in November, 2004, under the auspices of ICFA and ILCSC. With this background and context, the LC Project Office at KEK has launched five Working Groups to engage in evaluations and studies of many aspects of the ILC accelerator systems design, so as to maximally contribute to the world efforts for ILC. The Group leaders have been assigned, and the outlines of the study items for each of these Working Groups can be viewed at http://lcdev.kek.jp/ILC-AsiaWG .
The present plans for these Working Groups have been laid out primarily to accelerate the organized efforts by the accelerator scientists, physicists and engineers in Japan, and our initial focus will be to make the best preparations for the November ILC Workshop. However, we should draw your attention to the fact that the activities of our Working Groups are not to be simply identified as the discussion groups that are planned at the November ILC Workshop. Also, our Working Groups are of a tentative nature, and are likely to be reorganized at the time when the GDI Central Team and Regional Teams are formally created.
We expect that similar working groups would be formed in North America and Europe, and our intention is to closely work with these colleagues in the meanwhile Naturally special attentions must be paid to maintain an open culture in which many aspects of coordination and study processes are to be shared by all the scientists and engineers who are interested in ILC. It is our intention to make our efforts in doing so. Finally, we should remind ourselves of the statements by ACFA and ALCSC where our colleagues in Asia express their expectations of KEK to make respectable contributions to the ILC efforts and to host the Asian Regional Center for GDI. Thus it is imperative for us to proceed in close contact with the members of the High Energy Physics community in Asia. For this reason, reports from and announcements concerning our Working Groups will be done and be posted in English whenever possible.
We thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation
KEK LC Project Office