Planning for SpaceUp | General | Forum

Here's a concept version of a single-page CLLARE flyer.  We probably want something better than this – I'm very bad at making stuff short and simple, which means my version has no room for pictures or anything – but I guess this gives a rough flavour of what we should be aiming for.

Not SpaceUp planning per se, but something we need to sort before SpaceUp: The Wiki is currently lagging quite far behind all our recent ideas, which have been recorded more in the Overview Document.  We should make sure that before the influx of people from SpaceUp the Wiki is looking fairly up to date and tidy.

Rizwan said:

We can still put in a powerpoint presentation for this, if brmj has a laptop.

I think that when they say "don’t assume that there will be audiovisual equipment to use", they are not so much talking about a lack of laptops (which will probably be everywhere!) but rather a lack of projectors / screens to project onto.  A powerpoint presentation on a laptop is not much good if there are more than about 4 people.

Still, it can't hurt to have a presentation prepared.  Who knows, maybe someone will bring a projector they are willing to let others use?

Oh, is that so?  Well, I guess we should definitely prepare some presentations then.  Hopefully we'll get more than 10 people interested, but if we only get 10 we should make sure we give them the best experience possible.

With regards to the Ignite talk, it's important to realise that we (frustratingly) don't have a lot of freedom with our presentation.  We get 20 slides and they auto-forward every 15 seconds, whether we are ready or not.  This means we can't have any slide contain too much information.  It also presumably means that they will want the presentation to be in some particular file format to facilitate the auto-forwarding – unless they just have a human sitting there with a stopwatch clicking the "next" button on whatever item of software we end up using (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that brmj doesn't have a copy of PowerPoint :p).

With the non-ignite talk we of course have a lot more freedom because we'll be running the laptop in question.

Back to ignite, we have 5 minutes to work with.  I guess a sensible break down would be 1 minute introducing CSTART – give the mission statement, explain roughly what we want to be, how we want it to work, 1 minute to go over the social contract, emphasise that we are open, safe, etc., 1 minute to go over the design philosophy, emphasise KISS, maybe think of some good examples (either to features of existing spacecraft which are much simpler than alternatives or to other kinds of machine which have been built to a fiercely simple philosophy and succeeded because of it), 1 minute to go over OHKLA (mention CSXT, NZ RocketLabs), 1 minute to go over CLLARE.  This is not a lot of time for each thing so we will have to plan carefully.

There is a lot of other really good, productive stuff going on right now, all over the project.  Unfortunately, SpaceUp has kind of fallen to the wayside because of this.  I don't mean to pull people away from good work they are doing in other places, but we shouldn't neglect SpaceUp too much.  Is there anything in particular that you would like us to help you out with, preparation wise, brmj?

I think the following was agreed in IRC:  I would take care of the slides for the CLLARE talk, Rizwan would handle the CSTART talk and the OHKLA talk, with DenisG doing the OHKLA talk if Rizwan didn't have time.  Rizwan is also doing some fliers and business cards.  As you can see, Rizwan is quite busy with all this.  DenisG is busy with exams and will only work on the OHKLA slides if we really have to – if you have time to spare, it may be worth while you taking over the OHKLA slides from Rizwan, since (i) he is so busy and (ii) you know OHKLA better than anyone else.  I dont' know how much work Rizwan has done already.

I did some work on the CLLARE slides tonight, I'm trying to get the details for our DropBox account from someone so I can share them.  The main thing that remains to be done is to insert graphics.  I'm waiting before doing that to hear back from Rocket about the possibility of getting some updated renders.

Something that has been slightly neglected is getting the webpage and Wiki up to date for the influx of new users.  There is a lot of outdated or even now outright wrong information around the place that we really should work on.  I hope to spend some time doing this tomorrow.