There are several models for rationales for gatherings. It might pay to distinguish among them.
1. Assemblies of people who are devoted to the advancement of the computer software that is the Sage "main line" of python code, used to glue together the collection of other systems from which it is build. Attendees may or may not have any particular understanding of what individual modules might do, and are primarily interested in interactive computing, web-based computing, compiling technology, etc. With a smattering of mathematics, perhaps at the undergraduate or even high-school level. Hackathons perhaps. 2. Assemblies of people interested in computer programs for performing computations in algebra, analysis, geometry, etc. Such conferences would naturally include competitors to Sage or its components (e.g. Maple, Mathematica enthusiasts), experts on components of Sage but not especially on Sage per se. Such assembles might consist solely of persons interested in one topic like "geometric data bases" or "high-precision arithmetic" or "group theory". An attempt to gather many people together might convene as collections of panels or sessions on subdisciplines e.g. algebra , group theory, number theory, ... 3. Assemblies of actual users of the program. For example, a conference on Advances in Chemical Engineering in which a session is devoted to innovative computer programs (e.g. Sage) used by chemical engineers. Such sessions can be very useful in introducing hew people to, uh, innovative computer programs used by their colleagues. 4. Assemblies of sort-of users of the program, e.g. teachers of math at a relatively low level, e.g. high school or lower-division college; or maybe people teaching at a more advanced level with a concentration on computational mathematics, or experimental mathematics. This can become deathly dull for the hacker community as the best papers may deal with pedagogy. (These people may collect in a session in meetings of type 2.) 5. Assemblies of people who study large computer systems, parallel computing, software techniques for compilation, truth maintenance, theorem proving, etc ... in which Sage is some kind of example of a problem and solution which can be explained to others and others can offer suggestions. Perhaps a friends-of-python conference. 6. Tutorial sessions, as perhaps the anonymous "somebody" requesting help from William. Presumably the "somebody" has a particular notion of what could be done with Sage (or Mathematica) in the context of (say) pre-algebra, calculus, etc. This "somebody" is looking to get a charitable donation of some sort, and it could plausibly be the case that Sage is not even the free software that should be used. In which case someone who is familiar with Sage, only, would not be particularly useful. Might it be better to have Octave, Axiom, Maxima (without the rest of Sage), etc for their purposes? 7. Assemblies of people who have nothing in common except that they have used Sage in some way does not seem coherent, though perhaps they have a bound in attempting/failing/succeeding in installing Sage and running through some tutorial. For people who have been taught "numeric" programming with data-structures no more sophisticated than arrays, it can be eye-opening to see computers doing "math". This is probably less eye-opening now compared to 1960, when FORTRAN was considered hot stuff. These assemblies, which seem to be what Harald is calling for "monthly Sage users meeting in Paris" sound quite boring unless there are communities of interest around particular subject matter. Or perhaps if you don't live in Paris at all, and it is an excuse to go to Paris once a month. You could look at the genesis and evolution of "Macsyma Users", MKM, SIGSAM etc meetings. Of course the old models are not the only ones available with email and blogs and newsgroups such as this. On Friday, September 27, 2013 9:59:30 AM UTC-7, William wrote: > > From somebody: > > "Does anyone know about workshops to train faculty to use/teach SAGE > (ie uses related to the undergraduate course contents)? We are not > able to afford the Mathematica site license (no help from other campus > users), so we're investigating open source options." > > -- > William Stein > Professor of Mathematics > University of Washington > http://wstein.org > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
