Peter Christensen wrote:

John (or anyone who knows): I'm working on the facilities plan for the Intro to Lisp workshop at the end of the month, and there were a few questions I had (some only need answers, some need action):

1. At IoD, is it just one big room that everyone will be in or are there different rooms where we can hold separate "tracks"?

Assume that there will be a single large conference room - it's an amazing space. I will tell you that ID maintains multiple floors within their building. Some floors have pretty amazing task areas for student groups to brainstorm in. We might be able to acquire one of these larger areas (assuming there are no weekend groups working, which is rather likely), but let's not count on it for now. I'll have more information as we get closer. I also suspect we should keep the flow of this particular meeting simple for our first attempt; having multiple tracks may be overwhelming, from a coordination perspective =)

2. What are the comfortable and legal occupancy limits (just in case lots of people decide to come)?

Assume a comfortable limit of 50. I can inquire after larger areas if this doesn't seem reasonable. We could potentially setup a small registration, disallowing non-registered people from attending this go-around. That would very likely be overkill, however.

3. I'd like to record the presentations in as many ways as possible.

Entirely agreed. I'm a media dummy though, so I'll have to let you take the lead on this. There will be plenty of outlets and other such things for ease of recording.

4. Coordination - John, could you set CLiki or some other wiki software on the chicagolisp.org <http://chicagolisp.org> website? That would probably cut down on a lot of emails.

I'm in the process of bringing the site up to speed. I'll have a wiki online (it won't be Lisp-based, at least for now, apologies). Thanks for your patience on this, it's been a hectic few weeks. See more here: http://www.chicagolisp.org/

5. Setup documentation - someone at the last meeting mentioned having documentation on how to setup a Lisp environment - I'd like to take a look over it and post is along with the announcements so as many people as possible can be ready before coming. I think that'll speed up the first session and make the most of our limited troubleshooting resources.

That was myself, and I was describing materials from my previous "micro" workshop. I'll polish those docs up and get them out the door sometime this week. Stay tuned.

I'll send out another email this week about the presentation schedule.

I'm double confirming that the space is available and that someone will be available to let us in. Wait on my final word of confirmation, which should be coming in the next 24 to 48 hours. Thanks for all of the help, I'm really looking forward to this. - John Quigley