Mini-conference on Apr 3/4!

[C. Scott Ananian]

We've gotten 9 proposals for our mini-conference, and I know of two
and a half more which haven't yet hit devel@ (Walter/Kim, Michael, and
Martin, on "build process", Bitfrost, and school servers).

Since most of the participants are local, we'll be having our
conference at the OLPC offices at 1 Cambridge Center next Thursday and
Friday (April 3 and 4).  Tentative plan is for talks from 12-6pm, then
dinner, and then informal discussion in the evenings. The community is
welcome!

One of my goals with this mini-conference is to encourage
cross-pollination between the teams working on various technologies,
and between developers and the community.  To that end, we'll schedule
each proposal in a ~1 hour window: a 30 minute talk, followed by no
more than 30 minutes of discussion, then on to the next topic.  The
goal isn't to nail down every open question during the hour, but
instead to start discussions which will continue in the evening and
online.  People who aren't terribly interested in a topic should be
able to enjoy and learn from the structured talk without having to
suffer through too much "vigorous debate".

I'd like to have webcasts of the talks for posting later, and/or for
live streaming, if possible.  Can anyone volunteer to help out with
this?  Martin will also be giving his school server half-a-talk from
Buenos Aires, so remote-conferencing help would be useful.

For proposers: I'd appreciate if you could organize your talks roughly
as follows:
 * background material ("what is a mesh network")
 * history & current state of affairs ("what currently works? what doesn't?")
 * open tasks, both "simple matters of programming" and "hard problems
no one has a clue about"
 * concrete proposal for forward progress.

The first two bullet points encourage the dissemmination of the bits
of specialized knowledge that live in a few developers' heads, and
insisting on a concrete proposal at the end will hopefully encourage
productive discussion.

More details as they're planned!  Hope to see you all there!
 --scott

-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )