[H-GEN] Re: Upcoming talks: SICP lecture series

Raymond Smith raymond at humbug.org.au
Sat Sep 18 22:41:39 EDT 2004


Hi Greg,

Thank you for sharing your concerns.

Ben's email may have led you to believe that a number of student
members have asked for screenings of SICP. This is not the case.
Andrae Muys, DSIG co-ordinator, on viewing the lectures identified
SICP as excellent material and of interest to the DSIG members.
He therefore proposed that we screen the film. As an added benefit,
he noted that the film would be of interest to UQ Students and so
may attact potential new members to our meetings. Having heard his
proposal, your executive took the decision to screen these films
on the basis that they are of interest to a sizeable minority of
our membership (programmers) and to groups we have traditionally
attracted as new members.

Ideally we would book a seperate room for this purpose. Regretably,
this is no longer an option as we do not wish to impose on ITS
who now pay (albeit via internal transfer) for our regular room
bookings since UQ started charging all community groups for
their use.

There are also two important mitigations. 

First, the lectures will be screened for one hour only. This is
leaves a good nine hours for activities of interest to all members.
If people are especially disinterested, then they may leave the
meeting for that time.

Second, the executive committee decision was that this series
would only be screened when no other talk was available. In
this way the lecture series will not exclude material of more
general interest to HUMBUG members. This point was lost somewhere
between the executive committee meeting and the announcement by
the Talks Maintainer.

Your idea of a panel discussion with 'real members' responding 
to questions from student members is an excellent one. Perhaps
we could flesh it out on a the 'talks' mailing list. 

Cheers,

-- 
Raymond Smith                                    
Secretary of HUMBUG 2003/2004              mailto:secretary at humbug.org.au
Home Unix Machine - Brisbane User Group    http://www.humbug.org.au/




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