Liverpool UK JUG

Information for guest speakers

Update 24 Oct 2003: Suggested hotels list.

We are keen to invite any interested speakers from industry, the development community, academia, (or other) to speak to the Liverpool JUG. The following information may be useful to you:

• Meetings take place on the 3rd Wednesday of every month, from 7pm onwards. Not every meeting is scheduled as a 'technical' meeting, so please check the website or contact us to check.
• We are currently looking for short talks (30-45 mins). This is under discussion and we are willing to consider other time-slots.
• As is probably standard with a not-for-profit grassroots organization, we are unable to offer payment.
• But we will cover the cost of any venue and projector hire, publicity etc., (and probably buy you drinks...)
• Our audience will be a mix of professionals, students, academics, and hobbyists. It's probably impossible to tailor a talk to all of these! But we recommend a balance between general interest overview, and your company/industry perspective on your specialised areas.
• We'll post to the website talk abstracts, photos and biographies based on the information that you provide us. We're happy to plug your work as recognition for your time and effort, (though we retain editorial control for length/content).
• We are more than happy to post links to your slides or articles after the event.
• We may occasionally be able to video the session and hold it for possibly webcasting later. We won't do this if you have any objections.
• As default, we will assume that you'll have slides/demos on your own laptop, but that we will provide whiteboard and projector. Please let us know if you need any additional materials/equipment.
• So far, our shortlisted venues do not have internet connectivity. Please let us know early if this will be an issue.
• Please get in touch with any questions about getting to Liverpool, the venue, or about finding accomodation. You may wish to consult the rather incompetent website of visitliverpool.com or call them on (0845 601 1125 / +44 151 709 8111) They have suggested the following hotels (prices correct as at Oct 2003, from expensive to less so)
  • Marriott Hotel, £115 room only (0870 400 7268)
  • Thistle Inn, £78 B&B; (0151 227 4444)
  • Holiday Inn, City £65 B&B; (0151 709 7090)
  • Travel Inn, Metro £50 Room only (0870 238 3323)
  • Gladstone Hotel £42 B&B; (0151 709 7050)
• We will contact you before your scheduled talks with mobile-numbers in case of problems en-route.

How is the site run?

The site is kindly hosted by Symbian Diaries, part of the All About Symbian group of sites, which is dedicated to Symbian, the operating system for mobile phones and other consumer devices. Most Symbian devices run Java (usually J2ME MIDP 1.0, or occasionally PersonalJava) and we hope that this group will be very strong in this area.

The blog software is Moveable Type: yes it's written in Perl, but we're not bigots... In any case, it works well, is free, and it's the software provided by Symbian Diaries!

The email mailing list is provided by Topica.

Mailing list

To subscribe to the discussion list, please send a blank email to [email protected].

Topica, our mailing list hosts, will try to persuade you to register with their service online. It's quite good, but you don't actually need to register online to take part in this discussion list.

Contact us

To contact us, either:

• email Mark Hobson or Hakim Cassimally
• leave a comment to this entry.
• Join the discussion list by emailing [email protected] to contact all of us...
• ... or join the announcement only list [email protected] to just get emails about events, meetings etc.

When/where are meetings held?

We will meet on the third Wednesday of every month in central Liverpool (Venue to be determined).

Meetings may include some technical content (talks or demonstrations) but will also be social. More details will appear on the website near the date of the meeting.

Is this group only about Java ?

The group's main focus is Java. But members in the group are interested in Macromedia Flash, Perl, HTML, Symbian, Javascript, and other technologies.

We want the group to be sociable and informal: if members want to talk about other technologies, then that's cool too! We'll also accept reasonable off-topic posts and discussions on the mailing list etc. And it would be interesting to have (short) talks about other technologies (especially controversial ones like "Why Visual Basic.net is better than Java", or "Static typing sucks" ;->).