April/May's Tech Meet

[Tom Hukins]

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 03:35:38PM +0000, Tony Edwardson wrote:
> I long while ago I volunteered to organise the April Tech meet
...
> Would anyone be prepared to help me out and step in for me ?

Given that it it takes a couple of months to find speakers and let
them prepare their talks before a technical meeting, I'm not surprised
nobody has volunteered.

But it would be a shame to miss out on a technical meeting.

So I've been thinking about an "unconference" (type the word into your
favourite search engine to find out more) style replacement where the
structure and content of the meeting emerges on the evening.  Before I
think more about this I thought I'd ask what the rest of you think:
if there are general murmurs of approval, or even "let's see what
happens" I'll think about this more.

I imagine us meeting as usual in the Systems Seminar room, with
various laptops, maybe a couple of projectors, whiteboards and other
things.  We would get together in small groups to discuss topics that
we determine at the start of the meeting or maybe beforehand, maybe
for a fixed amount of time or maybe until people drift off to do other
things.  Individuals might want to share their knowledge on a topic,
gather together others' knowledge, or play with interesting ideas.

Any questions?  Any suggestions?  Good idea or bad idea?

Tom