a2geeks Blog from Nov 21, 2008

Where	Kai Garden
When	11-21-08, 12 - 1:30 lunch
Facilitator	Dug Song
Scribe	Dug Song, Ed Vielmetti
Invitees	everyone
Attendees	Dug Song, Ed Vielmetti, Jonathan Duty, Marshall Weir, Matt Pizzimenti, Zach Steindler, Jonathan Cohen, Kevin Dangoor, Mark Ramm
Missing	Brian Kerr, Ross Johnson (said maybe?)

Agenda

• General Tso's chicken and tofu
• Scallion Pancakes
• Brown Rice

Minutes

ArbCamp will be what its participants make of it. Prior ArbCamp organizers had the intent of drawing a diverse crowd, which we should try to honor, but we're all geeks - Ed honestly has the best chance of doing this with 300+ a2b3 subscribers. Tangent: perhaps the original goal for ArbCamp would be better served as an a2b3 conference, timed with the Summer Fair, maybe with an application to AAACF for a community grant. Need to meet with previous organizers to explore.

PR around the event needs to support this mission, but in an unconference, whoever shows up is what you have to work with. We will try to support this a bit by calling for attendee profiles to post that represent the diversity we're hoping for. We realize the partnership with SPARK may be as off-putting to some as the keynote speaker was for others last year, if this is to attract non-techies.

Goals for the event:

• Good turnout, high participation
• Teach others how to do this themselves, inspire many other similar events
• Share the event logistics to help the community help themselves (Mark had trouble getting WCC, which Ed said was a just a matter of talking with Charlie Penner - inside baseball we can all use). Open-source event planning.

Non-goals for the event:

• Ensure the topics and people we want are represented. We must accept that an unconference will be unpredictable. If we have goals to support diversity, our only tool is affirmative action, as we cannot dictate the material. We will try to reach out as far as our networks go - any and all help is appreciated...

Key Outcomes

Space

Four corners of the room, plus a small conference room, so 5 parallel tracks. Can make a field trip to SPARK to visit the space later and check on things.

Schedule

6 PM	Food and mingling
7 - 7:30 PM	Opening session. MCs in priority order of availability: Brian Kerr, Ed, Mark, Matt Pizzimenti
7:30 - 10:30 PM	5 parallel tracks of half-hour blocks (possibly combined to make longer sessions), so anywhere from 15 one hour sessions to 30 half-hour sessions possible
10:30 PM	Lightning talks to wrap up based on leftover session ideas and any other prepared topics anyone submits. Talk duration will be fixed, and determined based on the number of topics to cover - anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes per presenter. This is the closing session for the unconference, but the opening session for the afterparty...

Attendance Cap

SPARK holds 100. When we hit this, we close off website registrations and open a waitlist.

Resources

• Need whiteboards, SPARK doesn't have many. Jonathan Duty, Dug Song to bring some. Prop Dispo also has them for $5 each.
• Zattoo brings one projector and screen, SPARK has one. Marshall to look into another.

Sponsors

Zach will be the sponsor coordinator. Ed suggests printed materials as sponsorship opportunities.

Next Steps

• Meet every Friday for lunch at Kai Garden until the event, skipping next week (Thanksgiving)
• Dug out all next week, maybe available a bit online.
• Next meeting: Friday, Dec 5, noon lunch
• Manually reconcile Facebook event regs with the website (Jonathan Duty?)
• Zach to work with designer friend to finish blog badges and flyer design
• Dug to follow up with Matt at a2skatepark.org to find out about 4x6 glossy club flyers we did
• Zach to coordinate UM street team to hit up computing sites, bulletin boards, hallways
• All: reach out to publicize event. Invite profiles from diverse representation of attendees

Open Issues

• After Party? Actually, Hathaway's Hideaway would be a perfect community unconference space...
• Contingency plan for an overflow or alternate space (Google A2 only holds 110)?

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Devon Persing. I don't have a company, but I do freelance and contract info architecture, front-end web design, and online writing/editing work. I got an MS from the UM School of Information in 2006, in the Library and Information Services track. I also have a BA in creative writing. In my work, I like to keep things simple, accessible, and usable. During the day I help manage digital services for the Kresge Library at the Ross School of Business.

Why are you attending ArbCamp?

As an interdisciplinary nerd, I'm interested in meeting other interdisciplinary nerds, seeing how they manage their worklives, and learning more about what they're up to and where collaborations are possible.

If you were to lead a session, what would it be about?

I just finished reading Rosalind Williams's Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, and it's been shaping my recent thoughts about technology. Since I come from a liberal arts background, I've always been interested in the intersections between science and art, and of late I've become particularly taken with the history of technology and how it has influenced literature and other art forms, and how all this affects daily lives. So, if I were to lead a session, it would probably be about those intersections, and perhaps how people in the group have experienced them.

Tell us one random fact about yourself.

I grew up in an amusement park.

Where can we find you?

blog: http://viscousplatypus.net
sad, sad pro site: http://dpersing.com
twitter: viscousplatypus

Who are you and what do you do?

I telecommute for NVIDIA from my house in AA. I work in the Research group, which means it's my job to think about what a GPU might be 3 years from now. I'm also interested in figuring out how to use the current generation of GPUs for scientific computing. Mostly I write a ton of code in CUDA.

Why are you attending ArbCamp?

Dug Song is a persuasive dude. But really, I'd like to get more involved in the local tech scene.

If you were to lead a session, what would it be about?

Parallel programming is the future (and increasingly the present), but most people don't realize it yet. I work in CUDA a lot, which is NVIDIA's parallel version of C, but there are lots of other interesting parallel languages and models out there. I'd love to talk about the state of the art in parallel programming, and find out what other people are doing and how they plan to adapt to a world where processors are getting wider but not faster.

Tell us one random fact about yourself.

I'm trying to learn how to ice skate. My legs are covered in bruises.

Where can we find you?

http://www.jcohen.name