Organization

The EPICS Council now decides where meetings will be held, so there are usually 2 meetings a year, circulating between the Americas, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. Future meeting locations that have already been fixed are usually listed here.

Collaboration meetings are usually 3 days long from Tuesday to Thursday or Wednesday to Friday, allowing for training and smaller working groups on the other days of the week. You’ll need a big room for the full meeting, and some smaller meeting rooms for any workshops and training sessions you host.

Also somewhere near the refreshment location a room for any exhibitions; past meetings have succeeded in attracting companies who will a small sum to put up a display table at these meetings. Providing large-screen TVs or projectors in the exhibition space allows EPICS-related projects to demonstrate their software.

Recent attendance has been between 80-130 people, but this depends on the number of users from the hosting site and nearby. It can be difficult for government-funded workers (especially from US Department of Energy labs) to get approval for travel to exotic locations though, so expect attendance to vary. Workshops can be around 30 people, but may vary depending on the topic. If someone wants to run a workshop you can ask them for estimates on numbers.

To include some hands-on training you may may provide PCs capable of running a virtual machine for students to use, or ask them to bring their own laptops (which some will do anyway). Training is still possible without these, but would consist of basic lectures and demo’s only. You would need to decide what kind of training you want, and organize some people in the community to give it.

Topics for workshops should generally be aligned with interests of the hosts. It will take support on the host side to make sure there is sufficient interest and attendance. Subgroups of developers such as the EPICS Core, CS-Studio and AreaDetector groups may ask to hold a private developers meeting adjacent to the main meeting, which will usually require providing a 10-15 seat meeting room with WiFi for each group for the period of their meeting.