Based on the comments and edits below, how's about something like this. Trying to strike a balance between keeping it somewhat flexible but also making it appealing...

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Hydra Connect Meeting, San Diego, 21-24 January 2014

Mark your calendars and join the growing Hydra community for the Worldwide Hydra Connect Meeting to be hosted by University of California, San Diego, January 21-24, 2014! This is a new event for the Hydra community and is focused on connecting you to the benefits of Hydra solutions, its community, and the way we work. For folks who haven't attended a Hydra meeting before, this is an opportunity to connect with other Hydra users, find out what Hydra is all about, and get involved; for established Hydranauts it is an opportunity to share experience with friends old and new, and to see what is going on across the Hydrasphere. As a Hydra Partner or user, if you can only make it to one Hydra meeting this academic year, this is the one to attend.

The agenda is shaping up and it will provide a chance to engage people who want to know more about Hydra, more about what their peers are producing, deepen engagement with active projects or to pursue to new ideas. This is an opportunity for all Hydra Project participants, old, new and fledgling, to gather in one place at one time, with an emphasis on sync'ing efforts, technical development, plans, and community links.

Tuesday 21st January will focus on workshops, tutorials and "un-conference" slot planning. Current suggestions include:

RailsBridge
Dive into Hydra
Hydra for Managers
Open Track Planning

We welcome suggestions for other sessions, and volunteers lead to them.

Wednesday 22nd and Thursday 23rd January will be a mix of plenary sessions, open forums and working groups.

Wednesday will start with "Welcome & What's the Big Deal?" - a fairly brief summation of Hydra's core purpose, the state of the Hydrasphere today, and an indication of the exciting developments already taking place or planned over the coming months.

Common to both days, we plan plenary sessions briefly demonstrating some of the established production Hydra heads, to show the range of Hydra's capabilities, and some of the new heads still in development addressing further community needs. Some of these new, cutting-edge heads are intended to become "solution packs". There will be extended open sessions for participants to meet and talk with managers and developers from many of the Hydra Partners to follow up on the demonstrations, see further Hydra heads in a less formal setting, ask questions, plan possible collaborations, network and generally to get involved! In addition there will be working groups addressing a range of community and software issues (some likely formed following discussions in the plenary sessions).

All Hydra Partners will be asked to prepare a poster, live demo or "lightning talk" that highlights the features, functions and uses of their Hydra-based solutions. This will provide all attendees with a first-of-its-kind global view of all Hydra development.

On the Wednesday evening we plan a social event.

Friday 24th January will be a chance for focussed workgroups to come together, for instance to plan future developments. Workgroups have already been proposed to discuss:

Hydra and Fedora 4
Hydra and RDF
A "sharable IR" solution pack
Media solutions: Avalon, Hydra DAMs, and more

...and we welcome advance suggestions for others. Undoubtedly, one or two groups will come together based on conversations in the preceding days.

You want to come? (Of course you do!) A formal booking procedure will be announced shortly. For the moment, mark the dates in your diary and, importantly, fill in your details on the wiki page at Hydra Connect 2014 Attendee/Needs Estimation. If you don't have edit access to our wiki, email the details to hydra-steering@googlegroups.com and we'll fill it in for you. This page is to help us gauge likely attendance and the demand for block-booked hotel rooms. We'll then let you know about the meeting booking procedure (probably using EventBrite) as soon as it is available.

Please note, to help cover the costs of running the event, we will be requesting $40 per attendee.

Stay tuned for more details and of course - as is the Hydra Way – please make detailed suggestions……the agenda is what the community makes it!

See you in San Diego?!?

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Comments around first draft:

Mark your calendars and join the growing Hydra community for Worldwide Hydra Connect hosted by University of California, San Diego, January 21-24, 2014! This is a new event for the Hydra Community and is focused on connecting you to the benefits of Hydra solutions, community and the way we work. The event is an opportunity to connect with other Hydra users, find out what Hydra is all about, and get involved. As a Hydra user, partner, or adopter, if you can only attend one Hydra meeting a year, this is the one to attend.

The current agenda is shaping up and i t will be a chance to engage people who want to know more about Hydra, more about what their peers are producing, deepen engagement with active projects or to pursue to new ideas. This is an opportunity for all Hydra Project participants to gather in one place at one time, with an emphasis on sync'ing efforts, technical development, plans, and community links.

Tues: workshops and tutorials such as

RailsBridge
Dive into Hydra
Hydra for Managers
Open Track planning

Wed plenary sessions: project demos perhaps 24x7 related to posters then breakout to network during poster session, evening dinner event

Do you also want to have a short general intro for new comers so everyone has the same starting point before diving into demos? Something to give the demos structure, like why is this cutting edge? If you jump into cutting edge, some people won't understand that the mundane necessities have already been resolved. It will seem redundant to contributors who have been part of the community for some time, but if part of the goal of the meeting is bring everyone up to speed and encourage new adopters, it would be good to spend 30 mins laying down the basics. And perhaps that's what the workshops on Tues are supposed to do - then we need to make that clear, and even so, a quick review at the beginning wouldn't hurt. I believe this is also a good idea and would suggest something short like - Welcome & What's the Big Deal? (then discuss our core purpose, where we are today and where we are headed as a teaser for the rest of the week)
Plenary demonstrations of some of the major, new Hydra heads: a chance to see some of the cutting edge development going on with Hydra
Open session: this is planned to be a major component of the meeting where you can discuss Hydra implementations with the folks who built and use them. Ask all the questions you wouldn’t have wanted to ask on a mailing list! We’re asking everyone to have a quick 7 slide presentation answering the big “why?” and “how?” questions to facilitate these discussions and to make it easy to repeat them time and again as new people roll up. Hopefully folks will be happy to demonstrate their Hydra heads too.
Evening event (are we committing to dinner yet?) - I think it is a nice way for people to interact informally, meet each other and know that everyone (or most everyone) will be in the same place. Maybe it doesn't have to be a sit down dinner, but a reception with enough food to keep folks there. I agree and the idea of a venue such as the aquarium has been floated by Declan.

Thurs plenary sessions: more demos of current Hydra heads and projects I would say solutions - Avalon, Sufia, etc, active projects to gain involvement (IR, MOOCs, further Avalon) & communicate status and activity to generate/identify new sweet spots with interspersed networking opportunities.

I thought Thursday was going to be a number of small interest groups? Do we need examples of what they might be? How many are we now shooting for? 3? 4? (Plus any very small ones that can be accommodated in a small corner?) I think we should seed this list. Does Mark’s “similar to Tuesday” imply some sort of plenary in the morning?

Friday: break out workgroups. Active workgroups plus time to plan or work on ideas generated from Wed & Thursday.

I think we need a bit more detail here for people to commit to going….

How are we going to describe the workgroups and make it different from Thursday (pm?) (or is it?) Will two days of workgroup type things sound attractive? Maybe we nee dot describe what we mean by a work group in a bit more detail.

We need your input.

First, we need to know how many people are attending to secure a hotel block. Please go to the Hydra wiki to help us get a 'head' count (sorry for the pun): https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=35619450

Second, we need your ideas for plenary topics. (if there is a Thursday am plenary?)

Ideas for topics? Do we want to ask for ideas and where would they put them?

We will be looking for quick 7 slide presentations and posters. Please sign up here for a poster/24x7 slide presentations. (will people know what that is? I didn't) (Think we're going to solicit these individually?)

More details to follow shortly.

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