The significant effort in European laboratories on amorphous materials is, unfortunately, largely uncoordinated, and spans research communities which have evolved separately for decades. The COST Action will facilitate, through networking, the emergence of a common vocabulary, the solution of shared experimental and numerical problems, the identification of assessment protocols in simulation and experiment that will best permit to assess the domain of applicability of existing theories, and finally the development of coherent and microscopically based constitutive equations. The Action will be overseen by a managing committee (MC) that will meet around twice a year. The MC will comprise a core group of leading scientists with expertise in the topics of the action. It will include in particular the chair and vice-chair and all working group (WG) coordinators, with national representatives in addition as appropriate. The MC will:

• organize general Action conferences (roughly every other year, alternating with summer schools) intended to bring together most of the participants, with topics depending on which of the Action objectives require further progress
• put out calls (every 6 months) for applications for smaller workshops proposed by Action participants; prioritise projects which link previously disparate areas
• put out calls for applications for STSMs, with priority given to missions that strengthen connections between groups in different areas (theory/simulation/experiment; colloids vs metallic glasses; etc), and help transfer of knowledge to industry.

The committee will nominate among its members an STSMs coordinator, who will prepare the selection and review process of the annual STSMs. He/She will be specifically responsible for overseeing that the Action implements best practices in terms of gender issues and the involvement of ESRs.

A training group will be in charge of: (i) the organisation of tutorial sessions which will precede workshops and Action conferences; (ii) organize, under the oversight of the MC, two summer/winter schools over the duration of the Action. It will be responsible for the application of best practice, in terms of the involvement of ESRs and gender issues, in workshops and conferences – in particular during the selection of invited speakers – and will check that the timing of these events are compatible with the needs of young parents (targeting ESRs, men and women), for example by avoiding common vacation times.

The web site group will be in charge of setting up and managing the Action website. The Action website will be a key dissemination mechanism (see H.2), but will also be used to facilitate submission and assessment of workshop and visit (STSM) applications.

A core group (CG) will be nominated to assure more rapid, efficient and flexible coordination of the Action. The CG will be formed of the MC Chair, the MC vice-Chair, the WG Leaders, and the STSMs coordinator. The CG will prepare all relevant documents for the MC meetings.

Participating institutions will take turns as hosts for the biannual half-day MC meetings. Where possible, MC meetings will be co-located with Action workshops or conferences to minimise travel costs. An approximate schedule of the meetings is given in section F.

During the Kick-off meeting, once the Chair and vice-Chair have been elected, the MC will proceed with the basic organisation of the Action: establishing the Working Groups, the sub-committees, and appointing their coordinators, nominating the STSMs coordinator, setting basic rules for organizing the implementation of the Action; introducing collaborative tools.

A coherent account of the achievements of research co-ordinated under the Action will be summarized in book form, on the basis of proceedings from presentations at the final Action conference. The MC will set up an Editorial Board for the book, to select contributors and suggest referees. The option of publishing the book as a special issue of an international peer-reviewed journal (e.g. J. Physics Condensed Matter) rather than a stand-alone book will be explored to maximize external visibility.

The work of the Action will be implemented via five working groups (WGs). Each WG will have a coordinator, gender and nationality-balanced across WGs in as far as is possible, who will sit on the MC. Vice-coordinators will be chosen preferentially outside the MC, so as to ensure a better involvement of ESRs in the organization of the Action. The precise work programme will be decided by the WG coordinators, once appointed, in consultation with other WG members. WG chairs will report plans and progress annually to the MC, along with any changes arising from this annual progress review. Membership in WGs will be open to all interested parties, in line with the general open character of the Action. WG meeting will be coordinated with MC meetings, to save costs and increase synergy. They will take place individually (quarter-day each) at alternate meetings to discuss technical issues appropriate to the WG and jointly otherwise (one-day) to also discuss common interests. These meetings, open to any interested member of the Action, will be time-tabled so that researchers contributing to two or more WGs can attend the appropriate discussions. The progress of each aspect of the research will be reported and monitored, with young scientists given priority in presenting their work.

The Action will be open throughout, and welcome the participation of researchers from related fields. A dedicated web site will be set up to help disseminate Action results beyond publication in the open literature as detailed in Section H.2. This will give the Action visibility towards other research programmes in the general field. The website sub-committee will include in its remit also active liaison with related research communities, for example by circulating announcements of Action events to mailing lists such as the Soft Matter mailing list (hosted in Leeds UK) and the mailing list of the Liquid Matter conference series. Similar liaison is also planned with national initiatives which would support the aims of the Action. These include a network on Jamming and rheology in the Netherlands, the Danish National Research Foundation “Glass and time” centre, and the “Soft matter and statistical physics” Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council programme in Edinburgh.

This COST Action will respect an appropriate gender balance in all its activities and the Management Committee will place this as a standard item on all its MC agendas. The Action will also be committed to involving ESRs to the maximum extent possible, including practical training in management skills by active involvement in organisational tasks. This item will also be placed as a standard item on all MC agendas. See Part 2, Sec. E for further details.

In particular, for oversubscribed meetings, the balance of researchers of different genders, levels of seniority, and nationalities, will be monitored so as to give preference to more junior researchers and those from underrepresented groups. Similarly, for visits from one Action group to another (STSMs), applications from early-stage researchers will be given priority, particularly for longer visits. At Action workshops and conferences, participants will be encouraged to have the more junior researchers present the work if they were actively involved. WGs will in their meetings place emphasis on monitoring the progress of early-stage researchers. This will include actively suggesting STSMs where these would be beneficial to scientific and career progress, and feeding back to MC what topics would be most useful for ESRs in the Action summer/winter schools.