Hello Everyone,

Our planning for the conference continues, but we still could use your input when you get a chance to reply. Here are a few decisions we are hoping to consider completed soon:

1. Conference dates:
Fan Hong and CMATC have proposed July 2 to July 6 as the week of CALMet 2007. Unless anyone sees a considerable problem with these dates, I think we should allow CMATC to hold these as final.

2. Excursion mid-week:
There has been a suggestion to hold the conference over 6 days rather than 5 (making the dates July 2 to July 7) to accomodate a full day of site seeing (required to see some more distant sites). We propose this excursion day would on Wednesday during the conference. Several of us would look forward to the opportunity to break up the long days of presentations with a day of more informal socializing and sharing. In this option, Saturday might be a full working day, or perhaps one more devoted to workshops or other activities. Vesa has also suggested that the CMATC visit might be on Saturday if we take this approach. Does anyone feel this approach would present a problem? Do you support this?

3. Conference keynote speakers:
Vesa and I proposed a first list of possible keynote speakers, but we would like to hear from you who you would like to deliver an opening talk at the start of each working day. We listed people who have a long history with the CALMet community, and who have not presented keynote speeches previously. But of course we want to ask speakers that you feel will inspire and stimulate creative thinking. This does not have to be decided immediately, but we hope you can start thinking about it.

That's all for now.

Pat