[Pl-seminar] NEPLS Business Meeting News

[Shriram Krishnamurthi]

We had a lively business meeting at yesterday's NEPLS hosted at Tufts
(thanks, Sam!).  Here are some issues and decisions:

- There appears to be a problem with announcement dissemination:
several people apparently did not get the announcement of yesterday's
event.  Can the people who run the Northeastern PL and BU Church lists
please contact me so we can ensure this doesn't repeat?

- The question of how many NEPLS to have in a year -- two or three --
remains open.  I had mooted a proposal of counting the IBM PL Day as
one such event, but it's not clear that enough people from NE attend
the IBM event.  In particular, the summer event -- which is the one
there was a suggestion to cancel -- is actually the easiest to
schedule due to space availability on most campuses.  So this issue
remains unresolved.

- We think it would be a good idea for speakers to explicitly mark
that their talk is a practice talk for an upcoming conference (say),
and to actively solicit feedback.  I'll think about ways to make this
clearer on the program.

- Some people want to be able to submit longer abstracts, of up to one
page.  We think this is a good idea (though nobody is under pressure
to submit more than one paragraph, if they think that gets the point
across adequately).

- Finally, our schedule has been disrupted quite a bit this year.  To
compensate, we are going to skip the summer meeting and have the next
one in the fall.  It's not yet clear whether that will be at Harvard
or at WPI.  I'll coordinate this with the respective hosts.

Thanks,
Shriram