One of the events at the workshop this week is a "writers'
workshop". This
is popular in the patterns community. We borrowed it from the
creative
writing community. It was invented about 50 years ago and has
become very
popular among poets, science fiction writers, and other creative
writers. We
started using it at PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programming) in 1994,
and now
it is used in lots of places, and not just for patterns.
The purpose of a writers' workshop is for a group of writers to help
each
other to improve. In the creative writing community, the rule is
that
everybody in the group has a paper that will be discussed, but in the
patterns community, we usually don't fallow that. However,
everybody must
have read the paper. During the workshop, the author is mostly
silent, and
the rest of the group does the talking. There is a moderator who
will make
sure that the conversation stays on topic and who tries to make sure
all the
important topics are covered. It will all be explained on
Wednesday.
For the moment, the only thing you need to know is that you should read
the
papers that will be in the writers' workshop. Read as many as you
can, but
read at least one. We will divide the group into the "workshop"
and the
"audience". People who haven't read the paper being discussed
will be in
the audience and will not be allowed to say anything. You don't
have to
have a detailed understanding of the paper. In fact, if you have
read the
paper two or three times and still have trouble figuring it out, you
don't
have to have much understanding at all. The fact that you could
understand
the paper on first reading is valuable to the author, and you need to
explain what makes it hard to understand.
It is fine to read papers on the plane. The paper "Reusable and
Extensible
High Level Data Distributions" by Diaconescu et al will be workshopped
on
Thursday. So, if you were going to save a paper to read Wednesday
night,
that would be the one.
You can find the papers at http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/patHPC/program.html.