Subject: ALU Board Meeting 2007.03.01 Minutes Rev. 1 Due Outs: JonL - Send list of speakers to N. Levine tonight if possible. Nick - Use list of speakers as you require. JonL - Send demo schedule to the ILC Organizing Committee tonight. JonL - Not discussed, but you might send a draft request of the permissions request to the board for comments. Nick - Send announcements of ALU General Meeting to alu-members and ILC07-attendees, per your suggestion. Nick - Send a list of recipients of the announcements to Pete, for record. Ernst - Write President's report. Ernst - Summarize the year's activities, as other for input as needed. Ernst - Write agenda for General Meeting. Rusty - Write financial report, to be read in absentia. All - Write your intentions as director for the coming year. Ernst - Take copies (1 soft, 1 hard) of ALU Charter (ALU-INC) and ALU BY-LAWS. JonL - Send to Nick the final drafts and collected reviews on 3 papers needing a final review. (Done) ** Change History 1-- Added due out for JonL re: send Nick the final drafts... 1-- Changed adjournment specs to reflect reality. 1-- Changed "draft schedule" to "demo schedule" to ILC OC task above 0-- Base. ================================================================================ Association of Lisp Users, Inc. (ALU) 01 March 2007 Board Meeting 22:00 hours UTC Minutes Rev. 1 Meeting held via telephone with the following board members present: Officers present: (V) = Voting member of the Board (NV) = Non-Voting Ernst van Waning, Pres.(NV) Carl Shapiro, V.P. (V) Rusty Johnson, Treas. (NV) Peter Lindahl, Sec. (V) Members present: Heow Eide-Goodman (V) Kuroda Hisao (V) Nick Levine (V) Duane Rettig (V) JonL White (V) President Ernst van Waning called the meeting to order at 22:10 UTC with a quorum of voting members present. As conference co-chair, Pascal Costanza will be in attendance for discussions of the ILC 2007 committee reports. Agenda Items: ILC 2007 Program Committee - At present there are 20 papers accepted with 2 more papers still pending approval. As was previously decided, the conference will be proceeding with a single track of presentations. There ensued a lengthy and somewhat heated discussion concerning how to proceed with the 2 pending papers. The schedule for the conference must be finalized in the next few days. After many iterations of discussion, it was generally decided that JonL White will send a list of all of the speakers as soon as possible to N. Levine, so that he may begin the necessary preparations. Speakers and papers can be removed if necessary. It was also generally agreed that JonL White will also send a draft schedule to the conference organizing committee this evening with the intent that the conference schedule be finalized no later than Monday. Concerning copyrights and permissions, talks, JonL White will be sending requests to the copyright holders to grant permission for the ALU and ACM to distribute the papers in printed form in the proceedings and electronic form at some time in the future. Permission will also be requested to distribute the audio of the talks, which will be recorded at the conference. Of the invited speakers, most are inclined to only give the talks, without papers. Pascal Costanza stated his positive response to presenting a workshop at the conference addressing Lisp in academics and how to collaborate productively. ILC 2007 Organizing Committee - N. Levine reports that at present, the ALU has received 66 registrations, with the break-even point around 75 or 76 registrations. The number of sleeping accommodations available can be viewed at the conference web site. It should be noted that an accommodation may appear under multiple categories, such as 'twin' and 'en suite'. See the attachment below for a more detailed report. Conference tutorials will have free Lisp distributions (trial versions) available on site to students, graciously provided by LispWorks, who have been tremendous supporters of the ALU and this conference. Other Lisp distributions may be made available by Lisp vendors at the conference. The location for the tutorials will have full wireless Internet access available. Internet access at the other sites will be limited. A machine can be made available to use as a gateway, however someone must volunteer to configure it. The programming challenge has not had many entrants thus far. The details for judging and awards remain to be worked out. At this time Pascal Costanza left the conference call with the thanks of the board for his continued efforts and participation as well as his forbearance. Minutes of the Previous Meeting - JonL White moved to accept the minutes of the 01 February 2007 meeting as posted via email. D. Rettig seconded the motion. The motion passed without dissent. Next Meeting - The next meeting of the ALU is to be held as the ALU General Meeting 03 April 2007 at 5:00 P.M. GMT at room LG18 in the Faculty of Law, West Road, Cambridge, U.K. The ALU board may meet as is deemed necessary at the conference site prior to the General Meeting. Meeting Announcements - It was generally agreed that the conference committee should announce the upcoming meetings. Specifically, the general meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 2007-04-03 at 5pm. It will take place in room LG18 in the Faculty of Law, West Road, Cambridge. In other words, it'll be in the same place as, and immediately following on from, the ILC's last invited speaker for the day. The meeting is scheduled to last for one hour which allows plenty of time to unwind before the conference banquet. N. Levine has agreed to send the meeting announcements to alu-members and ilc07-attendees (at) alu.org. He also agreed to send a list of the recipients to the ALU Secretary as record of our compliance with the ALU charter and by-laws. ALU Membership definition - It was generally agreed the following statement be made public to attendees concerning the definition of ALU membership for the purposes of the ALU General Meeting. "The ALU membership consists of those people who are currently paid-up members. Additionally, the board has determined that for the purposes of attending and voting at the 2007 general meeting, all delegates to ILC 2007 will be deemed to have paid that week's ALU subscription and so will count as members. In other words, you're all cordially invited." Optional wording: "The ALU membership consists of those people who are currently paid-up members. Additionally, the ALU board has determined that all paid attendees of the ILC 2007 conference will be deemed ALU members with full voting rights for the duration of the ILC 2007 conference." Proxies - The ALU Secretary reiterated incorrectly the policy defined by the ALU by-laws, that proxies must be delivered in writing or by e-mail to the ALU President or Secretary prior to the meeting. In fact, the ALU by-laws state thus: "ARTICLE II Section 8. PROXIES. At all meetings of the corporation, a member may vote by proxy executed in writing by the member or by his duly authorized attorney in fact. Such proxy shall be filed with the secretary of the corporation before or at the time of the meeting." Agenda - E. van Waning read the proposed generalized agenda aloud: a) President's report b) report of activities since last meeting c) finance report d) election of board e) any other business which the board wishes to place before the members f) any other business which the members wish to place before the board The proposal was met without dissent. Election of the Board - Over the years it has not been made clear how the election of Directors takes place. Concerning elections, the ALU by-laws state that the directors are elected by the members and the number of directors shall be 8. No other specifications are made. For this conference the procedures should be made clear well beforehand. Extended Board - The matter of the extended board was tabled to be taken up by the new board. JonL White moved to adjourn. D. Rettig seconded the motion. The motion passed unanimously. Meeting adjourned at 23:22 UTC. Peter Lindahl ALU Secretary -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attachment: ILC 2007 Monthly Report submitted by Nick Levine 1. Registrations The good news: we took just over 10k (GBP) in February;our bank balance (including items which are still clearing through the system) is now just over 37k. That's 65 people registered. The not so good news: over the last few days registrations appear to have tailed off somewhat. There ought to be more coming. But I don't know either when or how many. The details: I do not know how many of our potentially-accepted speakers are in the above count, because I haven't been given the names of these people. So I can't estimate how the registrations will grow once we tell speakers that their papers have definitely been accepted. Three of the invited speakers have registered for accommodation. I imagine that more might want to do so, but this hasn't yet come about. Pascal distributed a major "call for participation" (CfP) mid way through last week. I was hoping for a surge in interest following the CfP but sadly this hasn't happened. I think the most likely reason (and we have received some emails that support this theory) is that people may be waiting for the full schedule of speakers to be published, before they register. I have no way of knowing how many people are waiting in this category. On good days I imagine it's a goodly number, on bad days it's just a handful. However many, I really want to make sure we get as many as possible of them coming to our conference. It's my understanding that the program committee have set tomorrow (2007-03-02) as the deadline for resubmissions by potentially-accepted speakers. They should be able to generate both the list of speakers and the full schedule very soon after that. I will certainly do my best to turn it round as rapidly as I will work can. Getting the full schedule onto the website over the weekend would be great. Advance registration ends at 8am (GMT) on Monday 2007-03-12. We really need our best estimate of numbers by that date, for the venue (so they can arrange staffing levels), the caterers, the printers, t-shirt people, and so forth. I want to do everything possible to encourage as many registrations as we can to be in place by then. All this means that I really hope that next week (Monday 5th - Monday 12th) will be fairly crazy. We'll see. 2. Venues As far as I know everything is under control. I did a walk around a couple of weeks ago to familiarize myself with the rooms etc. Internet access from the Law faculty: we have experimentally verified that my laptop plus the 3G card I've arranged to borrow can see the Internet from the location in the Law building where I want to park the registration tables. This means that we can take Paypal transactions on the door. It might be possible for someone to build a local network using my machine as a gateway, but that's not something I intend to attempt. We have spare rooms on all days (in particular: nothing is scheduled in for the room in Divinity at present). 3. Publicity Coinciding with the start of the conference programming competition, our journalist (Bill Thompson www.andfinally.com) issued a press release which was picked up by The Register and on its front page for a couple of days. http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/02/03/2007_international_lisp_conference/ All this generated some interest in the conference, but not much. Undoubtedly it gave lisp some broad exposure, and that's all for the best. 4. Competition Closing date is this Saturday (3rd). Five entries so far, possibly a few more to come in the next couple of days. Last time (NYC in 2003) we had 15 entries. The drop this time is probably due to the new rule that "in order to qualify for a prize, the entrant must register for at least one day of the conference." This rule was introduced because in 2003 none of the prize winners was present in person to collect their prize. Of the five entries so far only one is currently registered for the conference. The judges will make an executive decision over the weekend. One strong possibility is to reopen the competition for another two weeks and drop the new rule. 5. Board presence at the conference I believe the following will be here: myself, Roger, Ernst, Duane, Kuroda. Carl hopes to fly in for the last day. Everyone else (Pete, Rusty, JonL, Heow) either can't, or hasn't yet said. OK, that's it for monthly reports. Five weeks from now it'll all be over. End of Attachment --------------------------------------------------------------------------------