After the initial release of scikits.statsmodels, we started to have email discussions about the design, implementation and extension of statsmodels, as well as about datahandling and how to use statsmodels for different types of data. Since this discussion seemed to specialized to fill up scipy-dev with it, we decided to start a dedicated google group. The overall objective is to make python easier to use for statistical and econometric analysis, and the discussion group is open to and welcomes the discussion of related packages. The first example is pandas, a package for handling panel data that uses statsmodels for estimation. Anyone interested, is welcome to join us at http://groups.google.ca/group/pystatsmodels/topics?hl=en Josef et al