Contacts: People, Feedback, User Support, and Cooperation

A separate page People acknowledges the help given to the GAP project in different ways by many colleagues. All of these are refered to as the 'GAP Group'. To contact the GAP Group by email, please use the address support@gap-system.org. For ordinary mail use the address

The GAP Group
Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra
University of St. Andrews
Mathematical Institute
The North Haugh
St. Andrews, Fife, KY16 9SS
UK

Fax: +44 (0)1334 463748

The GAP Group is most interested in close contact to the users of GAP. On one hand we hope for feedback from users, on the other hand we are offering to give support to users as well as we can. However with both, reacting to feedback and giving support, users are kindly asked to understand that all this is done by colleagues who provide such service in addition to the work for their regular job.

Centres

In March 2005 the GAP Council and the GAP developers have agreed that status and responsibilities of "GAP Headquarters" should be passed to an equal collaboration of a number of "GAP Centers".

Feedback

We hope for feedback in particular in four instances.

When installing GAP. The GAP Group would appreciate some feedback on installations of the system. Please provide some such feedback as described on the page Installation Feedback by email to support@gap-system.org.
When using GAP. If you have used GAP we would appreciate some information about your work again by an email letter to the address support@gap-system.org, see also the page on Feedback on Use.
When publishing results. Finally, when you publish results obtained in part by using GAP we ask that you quote GAP (see recommended citation) and tell us about your publication again by email to support@gap-system.org since we would like to include a reference to your publication into the Bibliography about use of GAP.
When encountering bugs. We most urgently ask that you inform us if you encounter any bugs in GAP. Please send a bug report as described in GAP Trouble again to the address support@gap-system.org.

User Support

We offer to react as well as we can to questions, requests for help with problems, or complaints that you may have. However, for the sake of the whole user community of GAP, we ask you to separate these into two different categories.

GAP Support. We would like to deal with those topics that are more or less local to you, that is, are likely not of interest to most of the other GAP users by direct correspondence with you. Please send letters about such local problems and questions also to the address support@gap-system.org.
GAP Forum. On the other hand, the GAP Forum should be reserved for discussions about problems that are likely to interest many of the GAP users. It would also be welcome if you could occasionally tell other users in the GAP Forum about interesting applications you have made of GAP. All correspondence in the Forum is kept in the Forum Archive.
For theoretical questions on groups and related structures we like to point to the Group-Pub-forum in which such questions are answered and discussed by a large community of experts.
We provide links to further mathematical fora and to other addresses that we hope to be useful for mathematicians on the page 'To Outside World'.

Cooperation

The functionality of GAP has been widely enlarged by pieces of code and data collections that have been developed by users of GAP and have been provided to be used with the main GAP library. We distribute these in the form of Packages, Data Libraries, and Deposited Contributions. We welcome obtaining any further such contributions as well as references to GAP implementations in the course of your research projects that you want to keep with you but that you will allow to be listed on the page Undeposited Implementations.

As explained on the respective page we have established a procedure for formally 'accepting' some packages which we hope will give them a status comparable to a published paper. On a separate page we inform about the process of submitting contributions.

Alexander Hulpke is maintaining a collection of possible GAP projects.

Funding

We acknowledge with gratitude the financial support of the development of GAP by various Funding Bodies.

Finally, To Outside World gives a number of links that we hope to be occasionally useful to have at hand for users of GAP, although they have nothing directly to do with the system. Most of the links go to web sites with lots of information that we believe to be kept reasonably up to date for their respective purpose.