Subject: ALU Board Meeting 2008.07.10 Minutes Rev. 0 ===================================================================== Association of Lisp Users, Inc. (ALU) 10 July 2008 Board Meeting 22:00 hours UTC Minutes Rev. 0 Meeting was held via telephone with the following board members present, where (D) denotes Director Officers present: Ernst van Waning, Pres.(D) Rusty Johnson, Treas. (D) Peter Lindahl, Sec. Members present: Jeremy Jones (D) Duane Rettig (D) JonL White (D) President Ernst van Waning called the meeting to order at 22:12 UTC with a quorum of five directors present. The next meeting will be held at 22:00 UTC on September 4, 2008, by mutual agreement. JonL White moved to approve the minutes of June 5, 2008 and D. Rettig seconded the motion. The motion passed without dissent. - Reports - ILC-09 status (by Dan Weinreb) ================================================================= Status report on the ILC 2009 for July 10, 2008 Here's what I've done so far: I have received a check for $7,500 for ALU and opened a "doing business as" bank account at Citizen's Bank. I have engaged a graphic designer, Pat Morin, to design a logo, poster, tee shirt, conference proceedings cover, and so on. I have paid him for one half of the job up front, with the remainder to be paid on completion. I have paid him $548. This is the only expense I have incurred so far. I have met with Guy Steele and Howie Shrobe to discuss general issues. Most important, I have finalized the dates for the conference: March 22 - 26. I have been sending extensive email to many, many people I know in the Common Lisp world, asking whether they are interested in participating, or at least attending. I have set up a Drupal web site that we will use for blogs and discussion forums. The idea is to be able to start discussions before the conference and continue them afterward. This, as far as I know, is a somewhat novel idea. Continued discussion afterwards, by a simple mailing list, was done for the "Lightweight Languages 1" meeting, and was extremely interesting and useful. By using structured forums, we can more easily track multiple, parallel conversations. Setting up the site before the conference has several hoped-for advantages. For topics of panel sessions, we can get the more obvious points out of the way in advance, so that we don't have to waste time at the panel session rehashing what everybody already knows. I also hope that the discussions will engage people who are considering attending, and make them more interested in attending. The Drupal web site is graciously hosted for free by Anton van Straaten, who runs the "Lambda the Ultimate" Drupal site. One panel session I am sure we should do is the "Why Lisp?" panel, about how to persuade more people to consider using Lisp for their new projects, and what we can do pratically to make Lisp more useful and welcoming (including setting up a library system such as CLornucopia). I have several other ideas that will depend on whom we can get to participate. I am engaged in finding a webmaster for the main web site. Nick Levine has proposed doing this as a paid contract job. I think we really do need to pay someone to do this: it's a lot of work and requires someone committed and reliable who can respond quickly. We'd also like it to run in Lisp, of course, which further narrows the pool. Nick is very familiar with the existing Lisp software, which would make the job easier for him than for anyone else. Nick has proposed doing the work at his usual consulting rate, which is GBP 75/hour. I very much hope that this meets with the Board's approval. If it does not, I forsee a tough job for myself finding anyone else nearly so qualified, and anyone else would probably take many more hours to do the job. I have read every feedback form from the previous conference and assembled a summary of all pro and con points that can pertain to the 2009 conference. I am of course using these to guide my plans. I have written a "mission statement" for the conference to help guide future decisions: we should do what advances this mission, and not do what does not advance it. Here it is: The Mission of the International Lisp Conference 2009 ===================================================== Present research papers that report on new research, novel technical results, advances in the state of the art, or significant experience or experimentation. Share practical knowledge, techniques, libraries, tools, etc. Let people in the community meet each other and share ideas. Promote Lisp to the rest of the world, expanding the Lisp community. Discuss how Lisp can be made more valuable to more people, and how we can convince more people to learn it, try it, and eventually commit to it for real work? Create Lisp evangelists, start a groundswell. Provide the board meeting of Association of Lisp Users. Encourage participation by undergraduates. Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Lisp, in a forward-looking way. Unlike previous ILC conferences, I am very interested in having panel sessions as well as presentation of papers. I am also interested in having a session or two of "lightning" presentations, in which speakers are given five (maybe ten) minutes to present anything they way, e.g. "Here's a useful library that I've written". (Thanks to Juho Snellman for this idea.) I am working on obtaining a corporate sponsorship from ITA Software. The V.P. of Marketing, Cara Kretz, is extremely interested in being the main sponsor. We've discussed many idea. I believe that she now needs to talk to the financial people at ITA to see how much money we can get. It helps a great deal that we are discussing this in 2008, but the money will be spent in 2009, which means that it's in next years budget, which is yet uncommitted money. I am working on finding a printer for the hardcopy version of the proceedings. Right now, I want to get a cost estimate, and an estimate of the time that the job will take. So far, the company I know about has not yet answered my email query; I will call them on the phone shortly. (The Andrew T. Johnson company in Boston.) After that we'll refine the following schedule. The proposed (by Guy Steele) schedule for papers is: Call for papers out by September 2 (or earlier) Submissions due by November 3 PC meeting on December 5 Notices of acceptance by December 12 Camera-ready copy due January 21 Guy and Howie are planning to use software for paper submissions that allow authors to see comments and supply rebuttals. Apparently this has worked well for them in the past. I will leave this aspect of planning to Guy. I have not yet thought about what tutorials to have, and who might do them, except for the traditional "Basic Common Lisp" one. I have spoken to Peter Seibel, and he says he might be interested in doing it, but has not committed yet. I have posted a very preliminary "hold the date" announcement in varoius forums such as comp.lang.lisp. We need to put up the main web page with such a pre-announcement, which should be easy. I plan to have a conference banquet at the "Hotel @ MIT", and reserve a block of rooms. A big issue right now is estimating the number of attendees. Last time, we got 128 people. However, I am inclined to believe that due to physical proximity to MIT and Brown, which will both be on spring vacation during the conference, as well as Northeastern, that we many succeed in attracting more participants this year. (It has also been pointed out to me that the more presenters, the more attendees. Having panel sessions means more presenters for a conference of a given fixed length.) I certainly would like to plan room allocation to allow for at least 200 people. This should not be a problem, given the physical configuration of the Stata Center. However, I have to decide how many copies of the hardcopy proceedings to print, how many tee shirts to make, and so on. (Some people might want the proceedings on CD, as well. I know people who can copy CD's.) I have started putting together a set of guidance points for presenters, based on experience with previous conferences: Paper and presentations must be primarily about Lisp, not just "and I did it in Lisp." "Lisp", however, is defined very broadly. It most certainly includes all dialects of Lisp, including Scheme, for example. Don't spent TOO much time on your specific domain. Just enough to explain it, without going into unnecessary detail. Focus on the use of Lisp in your domain. Put your name, affiliation, email, web site on first slide, last slide, and the footer of every slide. The audience wants to know who you are and how to get in touch. Make sure you start out by answering the question: "Why should you care about what I'm about to tell you?" This was a problem last year: a whole talk about constraint propagation that left people saying "But why would I want to do that?" Think of your presentation as an advertisement for your paper: its job is to persuade people that they ought to take the time to read your paper. Therefore, you need not cover every point made in your paper. On a panel session, your initial presentation will be limited to a certain number of minutes. These limits will be enforced mercilessly, to ensure that there will be sufficient time for conversation after the initial presentations. Expect a big clock that will make a very disturbing loud noise when your time is up. (Thanks to Shriram for that last point.) I have been scouring the Web to find every Lisp-related blog that I can; I hope to publicize the conference on each of them, and encourage their authors to attend and perhaps participate. I have also been gathering up all information I can find about why people are resistent to using Lisp, so that we can address these points at the panel. I have two requests: (1) I would like to have access to the web site at which I can put up a simple static page at www.international-lisp-conference.org/2009 (2) I'd like any suggestions anyone might have for "big name" invited speakers, who will help draw attendance to the conference. Unfortunately for me, you have done such a good job of this in the past that many of the best people have already appeared as invited speakers: 2002: Danny Bobrow, Richard P Gabriel, Peter Norvig, Russ Altman 2003: Gerald Jay Sussman, Gregor Kiczales, John McCarthy, Paul Graham 2005: John Allen, Henry Lieberman, Richard Gabriel, Jeff Shrager, Bert Halstead, James McDonald, J Strother Moore, Will Clinger, Patrick Dussud, Henry Baker, John McCarthy 2007: Jans Aasman, Richard Jones, John Mallery, Ralf Moeller, Christian Queinneec, Manuel Serrano, Michael Sperber, Herbert Stoyan Perhaps enough time has passed that we could invite some of these people again. ============= End of ICP-09 status report ============================ Ernst announced that he will be unavailable during the last three weeks of July. Comments: All board members were very pleased with the report. Concerning engaging Nick Levine as ALU webmaster, we should elicit an estimate from Nick and coordinate website changes with Dan Weinreb, concerning ILC09. P. Lindahl will discuss the topic with Nick Levine Sunday evening. Concerning attendance estimates, Howie Shrobe should be involved, and we should take into consideration that local accomodation options, being more expensive, might increase the dorm attendance. We could also consider having a student rate for accomodations. ALU website - Consider replacing the machine altogether or resetting the root password to regain control of the ALU machine. - Status of a Communication Policy See attachment by Ernst van Waning. - (Jeremy) status Clornucopia The ALU board is supportive of CLornucopia, but questions exist concerning the funding for someone to maintain CLornucopia. Jeremy Jones will come up with estimates for such support, so that the board can make an informed decision. JonL White suggests considering a name change due to similarities with more vulgar terminology. - New business - Is the way we do business (by monthly meetings) optimal? E. van Waning suggests that we do more ALU discussion by email in advance of the phone meetings, to cover more ground and resolve issues ahead of voice discussions. This should make phone meetings more productive and require less time. Other comments expressed decry the benefits of being able to have a rapid Q&A about topics; that the board has not been very successful before at doing business by email; that there is value in having a specific deadline for assignments. Responses to these comments were to expressly state that the intent was not to replace the phone meetings but to support them by having more discussion by email in between phone meetings; the email venue allows broader participation by those unable to attend meetings; allows those whose writing skills exceed their spoken skills to participate more fully. Jeremy leaves at 23:06. General consensus was reached that the board should try to communicate more by email in between meetings and see how we progress with practice. JonL White moves to adjourn. Duane Rettig seconds. Motion passes. The meeting adjourned at 23:13. Peter Lindahl ALU Secretary ============================ Attachment ========================= Summary discussion about communication Ernst van Waning Now that discusson and generation of ideas is more quiet than in the last few weeks, I take the opportunity to summarize, so this document can also serve as a report to the ALU board. Before it goes to the board, please comment, so we will have a more accurate report. There were the broad topics of communication and buiding better facilities for the Lisp community. For this report, I have isolated five subjects: - ILC09 - Web site - CLornucopia - General communication about Lisp: whom to address - Contacting Lisp vendor's marketeers As you may have realized, I find communication very important for ALU. My ideal would be to be able to show a communication strategy leading up to ILC09 and continuing afterwards, with a web site that reflects a communications strategy. At ILC09 we might organize sessions on this very topic. Communication may not be our primary expertise, but please realize that if we don't concentrate on communication ALU makes itself essentially a conference organizer, which is not the same as an association for the Lisp community. The background for the discussion is the observation that the ALU board is not the primary organizer of ILC09 and that it can concentrate more on communication about Lisp in general and ILC09 in particular. Note that, although the web site is mentioned separately, it is the channel that is easiest to find for communications about Lisp (Google for Lisp, if in doubt). Everything we want to communicate will primarily be reflected in our web site. ILC09 Dan is now starting to engage a graphic designer, to come up with a logo and pleasing graphics for posters, tee shirts, name tags (yes, the names will be VERY big!), and so on. Dan and his wife have used this designer in the past with excellent results (see www.familyopera.org). This is probably going to be Dan's first monetary expense. He will ask ALU for a check, with which ILC09's bank account will be opened. At ILC09 Dan hopes to bring out interesting opinions on how to promote Lisp; in fact, he wants to have a panel session on that topic. Dan continues to spend time looking all over the web to locate interesting potential participants, finding every Lisp blog in the world, and so on. He has already gotten in touch with several people whom he thinks would be interesting to have. One probably failure is Lutz Mueller, the NewLisp guy, who says he's usually in Germany at that time, but says Dan should stay in touch in case his plans change. Dan hopes to bring in people who can talk about dialects other than Common Lisp and Scheme, even weird ones like NewLisp, just to expose people to new ideas. Web Site The www.lisp.org web site is in the enviable position of being second in the Google listings, when you query for "Lisp". (First is the Wikipedia, which is fine, and Google does an excellent job of showing interesting and important site for Lisp.) So, that makes it even more valuable to make www.lisp.org focus on explaining what Lisp is and promoting it. Easy to find as it may be, some think it might need some reflection: http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/29. Dan did some Googling and it looks like the blogger's name is Eric Normand. Remembering the issue ALU had with CLHS some time ago, there are definitely more topics for serious reflection than what Normand mentions. The graphic designs for ILC09 should be reachable from ALU's web site. ALU's web site should reflect news and status about ILC09 as accurately as possible. As preparation for the session on how to promote Lisp, we might open a page on the ALU Wiki and invite prominent members of the Lisp community (who are all concerned with the question of high-quality communication about Lisp) to participate in an "open mic" session. Someone can group and organize later on as the list grows. This page could be used as a starting point for the panel at the conference. That way the group can skip the obvious points and focus on "meta" issues. Specifically, tying it all together and getting it out as starting point for the panel session. CLornucopia Jeremy thinks a good CL library site is the perfect thing for ALU to do in addition to ILCs. Marco (Baringer) and Jeremy are working on a proposal to the ALU to fund a CL library site. CLornucopia is basically ready to go, but it needs someone to maintain the site. They are willing to donate the code (it's open source) and perhaps management, if ALU pays someone to maintain the site. Jeremy thinks Clozure is willing to supply the server as well. Expect a detailed proposal, probably next week. The site might also be donation supported, with the logos of the donors prominently displayed on the web site. General communication about Lisp: whom to address with what message? What to say to whom (i.e. finding the people who might be seriously interested in an explanation of why to use and invest in Lisp) is not entirely clear yet. The goal of this communication needs to be more precise. Vendors and perhaps other parties with interest (commercial or other) in Lisp will be approached to help clarify the goals to pursue and the messages ALU wants to give with this communication. Calling the subject "Why Lisp?" for now (substitute anything you prefer) the subject naturally breaks down in three categories: 1) "Why Lisp?" for Executives and Marketers. (Non-technical) 2) "Why Lisp?" for Beginning Programmers. (Techie-Lite) 3) "Why Lisp?" for Experienced Programmers. (Techie-Hard-Core) To cover the first category, commercial people at Franz and LispWorks are very experienced in finding organizations that might have or develop serious interest in Lisp. We ourselves know organizations seriously investing in Lisp (ITA, NG, Mathematical Systems, Selvaag, name others, please?). Managers at these companies will have non-technical reasons for continuing to invest in Lisp. Contacting Lisp vendor's Franz, LispWorks and Corman Lisp have been approached for support and advice on the topic above. All reacted with a positive response. ====================== End of attachment ===================