Mercury Meetings.

[Tyson Dowd]

The concept of a regular Mercury meeting has been discussed on this
list and in real-life, and has met with general approval.  
The idea is to have a relatively informal meeting, and a chance for
a social gathering too.
So here is a plan for having them:

How about a meeting around 5pm on a Tuesday, followed by dinner
(say pizza or something) for those who are interested.
The meeting itself shouldn't go for more than an hour or so.
We will try once per fortnight at first.

We will have a scheduled "speaker" to who is expected to present
some aspect of their work, or an interesting topic related to the field
in general for around 5-20 minutes.  This is not expected to be a big
deal (e.g. slides are definitely optional) -- but gives us a sure-fire
topic to discuss, and lets us know how people are going.   The topic
could be simply a design walk-through of a recent (or old) feature:
(e.g. how does the accurate garbage collector actually work), or a
discussion of relevant literature (where did all those squiggles in the
typeclass paper first come from?) or a general planning session (what's
in the next release, or how should we take over the world?).

The rest of the meeting will be devoted to general discussion of what
people are working on, questions, and possibly discussions to
settle/clarify issues that are being discussed on the mailing list.
The only note-taking that needs to be done is to record any decisions
made and reasons for them, so that people who cannot attend will be
able to find out what happened.

Oh, and I think once we get going, if it's working ok we should extend 
invitations to other research groups (here and at other institutions)
to come along.  I know of a few people that have expressed some interest
in being given "status reports" on Mercury.

How does this plan sound?

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # There isn't any reason why Linux can't be
                            # implemented as an enterprise computing solution.
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # Find out what you've been missing while you've
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd # been rebooting Windows NT. -- InfoWorld, 1998.