Group actions on stacks -- Behrang Noohi, March 7, 2008

We begin with a general discussion of difficulties arising in formulating group action problems on stacks. We then cast these in a homotopy theoretic language and propose a machinery which invokes the theory of crossed modules and butterflies to systematically study actions of (2-)group schemes on stacks. As an application, we explain how this method was used (in joint work with Kai Behrend) to classify smooth Deligne-Mumford curves.