Association of Lisp Users, Inc. (ALU) 				04 November 2004 
Board Meeting 							22:00 hours GMT 
Minutes 							Rev. 0

Meeting held telephonically with the following quorum of board members present: 
Officers present: 
	Ernst van Waning, Pres.		Carl Shapiro, V.P.
	John Adams, V.P., arrives at 22:57 GMT
Members present: 
	Nick Levine	Daniel Polani	Duane Rettig	JonL White

President Ernst van Waning called the meeting to order at 22:09 GMT
with four voting members present: Levine, Polani, Rettig and White,
with N. Levine holding proxy for R. Corman.

Next meeting to be held Dec 02, 2004 at 22:00 GMT.

Minutes of the October 2004 meeting are not available.  J. White will
contact P. Lindahl about the minutes.

Old Business:

1.  ILC-2003 status: C. Shapiro reported that some participants, such
  as speakers, still need to be reimbursed; not clear who they all
  are, but James Allen of Rochester and someone from ISI were
  mentioned.  C. Shapiro will send email to alu-board-only with a URL
  on bibop pointing to spreadsheets containing such information.
  All of the "papers" from 2003 are online; we need someone to work on
  them, etc.  The videos of the conference are in New York and
  C. Shapiro can get them sometime.  J. White asks, What are our
  obligations regarding publishing a Proceedings?  C. Shapiro replies,
  Somebody needs to find a schedule of ILC-2003 events and put that
  into a HTML table with links to the papers.

2.  CLRFI Status: N. Levine reported that this has been a quiet month
  with no big changes.  The CLRFI editors had a first vote on a
  procedural matter recently, and are now awaiting for the editor to
  come up with some information.  The number of hits on the web pages
  has dropped from ~400 to ~100.  And only a slow trickle of people
  have been subscribing to the mailing list, maybe one per week
  recently.

3.  ILC-2005 status:

Stanford venue:

  We have secured an allotment of housing rooms, and will have to
  refine it in February.  Laura Tibbits is the Stanford conference
  organizer assigned to us, and soon we will need to select a room for
  the conference sessions (there may be competition for good ones.)

  C. Shapiro reported that he got a response from CCRMA about having a
  music track or workshop in parallel with ILC-2005; and possibly some
  bioinformatics folks would like to do the same.  There are projects
  in Lisp in these groups.

Program Committee:

  C. Shapiro announces that he will have a refined list of committee
  members/candidates soon, with suggestions coming from Dr. Wu. of
  Franz, Inc.  Then he will send out invitations this week, inviting
  about 10 people, and hoping for about 6 acceptances.  N. Levine asks
  if a Program Chair has been selected, and C. Shapiro replies that
  J. White has volunteered.  J. White graciously accepts.  There was
  general consensus on this point.

Payment Procedure:

  C. Shapiro reported that it has been "Done," and we are only waiting
  for Rusty Johnson to validate our account with PayPal.  That is, we
  must supply our bank account number to PayPal, which then makes a
  test upon that account.  If the test is successful, we are thus
  verified.  PayPal has a shopping cart; the submit buttons send info
  off to alu.org, but some work remains to be done at alu.org in order
  to accept these communications.


4.  OOPSLA 2005 status:

  C. Shapiro reported on a meeting with J. White and Donna Baglio of
  ACM headquarters in NYC.  This took place last week, actually, on
  Thursday, October 28, 2004.  Some parts of the proposal Richard
  Gabriel sent to the ALU are beyond the operating paradigm that ACM
  has used in the past for collocated meetings, but in general Donna
  thought the extended plan was workable.  She requested that a "Memo
  of Understanding" (MoU) be drawn up by the OOPSLA steering committee
  to address the numerous issues arising from this joint proposal,
  especially including the areas that differ from ACM's previous
  financial model, and that the ALU and SIGPLAN present this back to
  her soon.

  J. White further reported that these conversations did not take
  place earlier, because most all of the principals were tied up at
  the OOPSLA 2004 conference.  Only after that ended, again on
  Thursday October 28, 2004 did we get communications from the ACM
  folks.  For example, Ralph Johnson, current general Chair of OOPSLA
  2005, has begun negotiations with offers of flexibility on meetings
  times via emails to J. White and C. Shapiro.  In past, other
  collocated conferences have not overlapped sessions with OOPSLA's
  main three days, namely Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.  So he
  suggested that we might have full ILC days on Sunday and Monday, but
  have only afternoon meetings on Tuesday and/or Wednesday, so as to
  permit ILC participants also to attend OOPSLA keynote sessions in
  the mornings.  Dick Gabriel returned from OOPSLA only yesterday, and
  has signaled readiness to handle these issues.  (Incidentally, Donna
  Baglio is on vacation this week and next; but the current ball lies
  in coming up with a joint statement between the OOPSLA-2005 steering
  committee and the ALU.)

  Ralph, Dick Gabriel, and Donna Baglio have all been unavailable for
  the previous week or two due to OOPSLA-2004 in Vancouver, B.C.
  Richard is back as of yesterday, and Ralph sent email this morning,
  so we can expect progress on a MoU very soon now.

  Much discussion ensued concerning topics such as what was would be
  happening now with ACM negation, and with what other conference
  planing could take place at the present time.  Furthermore, there
  was a revisiting of the issue as to whether two ALU-sponsored
  conferences could be held in California (or "West Coast") within a
  four month period; e.g. matters like travelers from farther off,
  such as Europe, might be willing to make one conference here, but
  not two in that time interval.  The question arose also that the
  "drawing cards", the big names and invited speakers could not be
  spread out between two conferences in such a short time without
  compromising our ability to reach a sufficiently large paying
  attendance.

  N. Levine proposed that in this coming month up to the next meeting,
  we continue to pursue Stanford as if we had not heard about the
  OOPSLA invitation, in order to further holding ILC 2005 at Stanford.
  Furthermore, that we continue attempting to negotiate a collocation
  with OOPSLA, with a final decision on the OOPSLA collocation matter
  before the next meeting.  D. Rettig seconds.

  Roll call vote: Affirmative: N. Levine, D. Rettig, D. Polani.
		  Negative: J. White.
		  Abstain: R. Corman (by proxy)

  J. White raised a question: The phrase "negotiate a collocation with
  OOPSLA" is ambiguous as to whether or not we have chosen Stanford as
  the sole locale (and time) choice for ILC-2005, to the exclusion of
  OOPSLA.  Have we indeed just voted down the possibility of holding
  ILC-2005 in San Diego in collocation with OOPSLA?

  D. Rettig replied by saying no, that this motion still means that we
  can pursue the OOPSLA venue to collocate ILC there; only that we
  would have to take another vote at a later time to change the venue.
  There was general consensus on this point.

5.  Adjournment: At 23:30 GMT, N. Levine departs as does the proxy of
  R. Corman with him, resulting in a loss of quorum.

Some members continued discussions informally for a while.

These minutes have been gratefully ascribed from notes taken by J. White
during this meeting.

Peter Lindahl
ALU Secretary