Update on the spring meeting:
Dates are solid and thanks to Michael's connections within the University we will be having the seminar in a royal venue (literaly).
We were able to reserve some rooms in what used to be the castle stables.
This stronghold makes up part of the ancient city walls, is on the bank of the idyllic Neckar river, and there is a student tavern with Heidelberg beer on tap on premises.
We will have a tower room in addition to two larger rooms for talks (with walls at least 1 meter thick to help with concentration).
So here is the plan so far:
Friday the 23rd of April we will likely start at around 10 A.M. (so people from Germany do not necessarily need to spend the night) and will stop when it makes sense. The focus on Friday is .LRN and all things related. It is likely that Friday will be more structured than the following day(s).
Saturday the 24th of April the focus will be OpenACS and will be very free form and dependent on the people there.
Sunday-Thursday possibly some sort of boot camp type thing (and facilities for any OpenACS hackers that want to work on things face-to-face). The boot camp part is still rough and will depend on volunteers and organizational support from outside of Heidelberg. I can provide computer facilities (computer pool, servers, and beamers for presentations) at the medical faculty and Michael will back me up if we need more (e.g. more rooms at the computer center). This part needs to be discussed and the focus here will be on people wanting to actually get into the code behind OpenACS/.LRN and build packages. If there are institutions interested in helping sponsor materials for this and maybe even jetting in a good teacher please contact me so I get a feel for what is possible (one possible funding model is having attendees from institutions pay a fee that will be applied towards boot camp learning materials).
So, we should have information about accommodations and registration soon. We will be covering the costs for the first day (e.g. food and refreshments) and the second day will be very informal (probably no official catering, but a nice place next door to get something to eat and things for people to munch and sip on)
Okay... enough for now. Just wanted to get the dates out there for people coming from overseas so they can get tickets now.
