[AG-TECH] Alliance-All Hands meeting

[Don Morton]

All, I'm really not trying to be critical but, I read
the following email message from home, quickly notified
a student who's volunteering for the SC Global programme,
and rushed onto campus to fire up the AG for the "How
to Build an Access Grid" presentation.  Having gotten
to campus and fired up the node, I learned that the ppt
slides had disappeared, that the session would be simply
broadcast.

This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened.
I had an audience for one of the UKy seminars last spring,
fired up the node, saw that I was alone in the venue, then
finally learned that they wouldn't be putting that day's
session on the AG, even though it was in the schedule
(I believe it was the day of the OSC MPI class).

I've already invited several people to some of the sessions
listed for tomorrow in the URL mentioned below, but now
my inclination is to tell them to come at their own risk.
I "doubt" that they're going to show up, anyway, but
occasionally they do.

I truly understand that "stuff happens" but, I also want
to assure you that when some of us get announcements like
this, we actually want to try to invite other people but,
I'm becoming more and more cautious, wondering if I 
should really invite them, just to have them drop what
they're doing, come over for a presentation, and find
out it was all in vain.

I don't know what the solution is.  Would it be helpful for
us to reply to these sorts of announcments and at least say,
"I plan to be there?"  I got the impression that folks didn't
expect a remote audience, so didn't feel it would inconvenience
anybody to cancel the slides, etc.??  Maybe if some of us
had responded, there would have been more reluctance to
pull back?

Again, I'm saying this in a friendly, but concerned tone.
If this sort of thing had happened to an airing of the
infamous "Survivor" show, rest assured that cities throughout
the States would be burning amidst riots :) :) :)

Thanks for listening,

Don



On Wed, 23 May 2001, Jeff Carpenter wrote:

> This is a reminder that portions of the Alliance All-hands meeting will be 
> available on the Access Grid starting this afternoon (Wednesday May 23) at 
> 1:00 pm CDT
> 
> Tech info and grid schedule page for this event is available at:
> http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/MEDIA/AllianceAll-hands-Tech.html
> 
> As we get them, Powerpoint slides will be available via the link to 
> agschedule.ncsa.uiuc.edu
> and time permitting will be added to the tech page.
> 
> Jeff Carpenter
> NCSA
> ------------------------
> 
> 

   Don Morton                      http://www.cs.umt.edu/~morton/
   Department of Computer Science       The University of Montana
   Missoula, MT 59812 | Voice (406) 243-4975 | Fax (406) 243-5139