This is a continuation of the preceding post regarding the setting up of the mini-polymath2 project.  From the discussion, it seems that it is best to start at some fixed time, either on July 8 or July 9, to ensure an orderly opening to the project and also so that I can select which of the six questions would be most suitable for such a project.

I have set up a placeholder wiki page for the project here, though right now it is necessarily quite bare.

There wasn’t much feedback on where to host the polymath project, but I am thinking of hosting the main project over on the polymath blog, in order to take advantage of the slightly better threading format there (numbered comments and nested comments in particular, although unfortunately there is no comment editing capability), and also because it would be technically easier to have multiple moderators on that blog.   When the project begins, I will also announce it in a brief post on this blog, which can then serve as the “meta” or “discussion” page for the project.

The one thing that I need to fix before the project begins is the starting time.   I do not know exactly when the Kazakhstan local IMO organising committee will release the full list of questions, but presumably they should be available by, say, noon July 8 at Kazazhstan time (GMT+4), or about 8am July 8 GMT, which would probably be the earliest feasible starting time.   Given that I am at GMT-8, the next reasonable starting time would be about eight hours later, at 4pm July 8 GMT.  Below is a poll regarding what times participants would most prefer and least prefer, spaced at 4 hour intervals:

I’ve set it so that up to three answers may be selected.  I am also open to other suggestions regarding the starting time.  I encourage everyone who is interested in participating to select some times for the poll.  Note: the times given are with respect to GMT.  A list of some representative time zones and their UTC offsets (which are more or less equivalent to GMT offsets, modulo daylight savings issues) can be found here.

With this feedback, I should be able to select a reasonable starting time.  The previous mini-polymath was active for about 48 hours (in particular, continuing to produce alternate solutions well after the first one was posted), and I would expect something similar here.  I am hoping therefore that provided there is some effort by participants to help bring people up to speed, that one could drop in even several hours after the formal start of the project and still be able to contribute.