CafeSci Organiser's Blog

At last I have been been able to sort out my first event. 18th May at the usual venue. It has taken some time because I have been rather busy. Hopefully a second event in June won’t be far behind.

I am interested in arranging a CafeSci visit to Kielder Observatory but I don’t know how people would react to that. If any one has any comments I would be only to pleased to hear them.

I look forward to seeing you all on the 18th.

Paul

We are moving towards getting the autumn schedule up and running.

There is already one item mentioned on the website – the September meeting.

Shortly I hope we’ll get the go ahead and the abstract to put the next item (October’s meeting) up on the site, and Paul and Pam (who are taking over as joint organisers) are working on the November one.

We decided that everyone is likely to be busy around Yule (when a December meeting might have been presumed to be planned) so that ‘slot’ will remain empty.    The plan is for the Café to start again in January, 2010 with a new programme.

So – that makes it events in Spetmeber, October, November, 2009 – followed by a holiday at Yule, then a new season starting in January.

As ever, Watch This Space!

… and now jsut one concert to go, next Friday.     So we can start concentrating on CafeSci again after that.

We’ve got one event for the three pre-Yule events already sorted out, and plans for the third.    The first one, in September needs a bit of work still, to identify a topic, find a relevant speaker, and get the whole thing sorted out.

At the same time, we need to change over organiser – and get everything set up in that direction, too.

Rest assured, we’ll publish the new season details as soon as we have them!

No blog for a while does not mean no activity!     THough a number of trips south have cut into the time available for blogging.

With an expanded organising team, we need to have a face to face meeting, formally to decide whether the Brapton CafeSci is to carry on with a programme in the autumn.     Then, if the decision is ‘yes’ to work out how to organise it, who will do what, and to thrash out a skeleton programme.    We will have our meeting on the 18th June, and so whould be in a position to publish at least some news shortly thereafter.

Our organising team now includes sources of ideas about subjects other than physics and mathematics, so if we do put together a programme to move forwards, I hope it will be a stimulating one.

The second event of our initial, experimental programme of four seems to have been a success.    About forty people attended the talk on The Universe, so Far, by Gary Fildes (Principal Astronomer, and Director of Kielder Observatory.    After his stimulating talk, a lively discussion ensued with some very good questions being put to Gary!    At times, the surroundings of the function room at the venue seemed to disappear as our imaginations were taken on a tour of the universe.

It ouwld be good to find a volunteer each time to provide a ‘write-up’ of the event for our newsletter.

We (the committee) are about to have ameeting to discuss what shape a future programme of events might take – since it seems that there is sufficient interest to take the idea of a Café Scientifique in Brampton forward.

As a result of issues raised during the discussion last night, I have added some links to the “Weblinks” section of the website, and started to organise the links into different categories.

One question for everyone – would an online discussion forum be of interest?    We could use it to share ideas, and to engage in further discussion about topics covered in the events.

I’ve just closed the pre-booking for Gary Fildes event on 26th May.    This is very well subscribed, and we want to be able to let people in at the door if we can.

It’s best, therefore, if all those who have pre-booked can arrive as early as possible!    Then we know how many we can admit at the door.

One or two questions have cropped up fairly frequently, the first of which is – though the events are (so far) held in a pub, can people under 18 attend.      There are two considerations for the answer to this, the first is – can they legally be admitted?   The pub authorities say, yes, provided they do not attempt to buy drinks at the bar downstairs, and they shold be accompanied by an adult.    Secondly is the question of what is the minimum at which the talks are pitched?   In our brief to speakers we ask them to pitch their talk to the interested non-scientist, so I suspect that in the main the talks would be accessible in some degree to anyone over the age of about 14 – but that’s just a rough guide.

If we can, we will experiment with placing the projection screen – so everyone can, we hope, see the slides the speaker brings.     Likewise, the whole idea of CaféSci is for peopel to engage with each other on the topic, and with the visiting speaker, so please do not be diffident about discussing things with neighbours in the room.

It has been suggested that followup discussion after the event should be held.   Well, the organisers have initially to return the room to its normal state, and pack up equipment, etc., so we cannot necessarily make such an after-event discussion formal.   However, the Shoulder is fairly quiet on most Tuesday evenings, so there is probably room in the bar downstairs for group discussions if people want to organise themselves – hint!

Our next event is on 26th May, when Gary Fildes from Kielder Observatory will talk about the Universe – so far! Should be a good and stimulating talk.

Bookings are going very well – it really helps us if people will pre-book either using the form on this website, or by ringing our answering service on 07970 318563.     It enables us to gauge how the room is filling up, and also to alert the licensee of the Shoulder of Mutton how many people might be pouring through the doors in a short space of time!

Just sent out links to our first Newsletter.    Don’t yet know if it will prove to be useful, but it seemed a worthwhile experiment – and hopefully, with a following wind, we can make it more content-rich in future.

Also just added some new products to our online shop – proceeds from this will go towards keeping th Café Sci going in Brampton.   Covering such items as publicity expenses (when we need to print posters, etc), any necessary expenditure on speakers’ travel (though we do not normally pay such items, in common with other CafésSci), venue expenses.

A number of suggestions asking for events themed in this area of science have been made.     We on the organising committee will be actively pursuing such ideas.    For something to make it into the programme, we need to be able to focus on a topic which will hopefully be interesting enough for people to come to it, bounded in such a way that an interesting talk of about 40 mins can be made, and we need to find a practising scientist or technologist who can compile and give that talk and who is prepared to come to Brampton to do it!

As far as is possible, we ask people to pre-book using the booking form on this website.   This enables us to gauge interest, and also to discern how the available space in the room might be filling up.

In relation to this, we also wish to enable people who simply turn up on the night to have some places.   As a result, we suspend the advance booking system a few days prior to the event – enabling us to reserve some space in the room.   If lots of people turn up on the door we will ask them to wait until we have most of the pre-booked people present – thus it’s useful to all if those who have pre-booked turn up early!

As with all of this kind of booking arrangement, the system relies on an accurately entered email address in order to send an acknowledgement to you.     Also, in order to reduce spam (usually sent from automated systems which scour the web looking for forms which can be ‘hijacked’ to spread such spam) we have incorporated, on both forms on our site, a “Captcha” which uses a scrambled, randomly generated code to cause a lot of spam engines to fail successfully to send a form.     This means that you have to put the characters in bold which are displayed just above an input box at the foot of the form into that box – otherwise the form will not reach us.

As ever, in the event of problems, please contact me – see the “Contacts” page.