Tim McGeary wrote:
> The Open Library Environment (OLE, pronounced oh-lay) Project invites 
> you to apply to participate in a two day Regional Design Workshop. The 
> purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for representatives of 
> local research libraries and related institutions to discuss our work 
> surrounding the current Integrated Library System and ideas on what this 
> type of core system should incorporate.  Workshops are being held in a 
> variety of locations in the US over the next 2 months. For more 
> information and to find a location near you, go to:
> http://oleproject.org/workshops.

That's quite a collection of workshops schedule.  I've been interested 
in the project since John Little first mentioned it here.  On behalf of 
the Spring 2008 JA-SIG conference committee I invited him (and he 
accepted) to do a birds of a feather session at the conference.  There 
are some things that I am working on that I think may fit well with the 
project (I was also a developer for a piece of Kuali Rice, so I know 
some of the Indiana folks) but I can't really tell from the number of 
workshops how the will inter-relate.  Since there were a few dates where 
there are simultaneous workshops in different cities it would seem to me 
that some sort of video conference and a real time collaborative system 
(we used Macromedia Breeze for the Kuali project with developers at 
Cornell and Indiana) would be useful.

With the current economy I know that travel budgets are undergoing a lot 
of scrutiny (I've even heard of a very large university system out west 
that may be halting all business travel for awhile) attending even one 
of the workshops may be problematic.