(In the process of getting involved, and wondering what you need to do next?   I’ve now put everything under the AGITTOC 2020 tab up top.)

Hi everyone,

Here’s where things stand.

I can actually safely give the first lecture on Saturday, but don’t want to rush it (I wanted to prepare it today, and then practice it tomorrow, but want to concentrate on the last set-up things, in the next paragraph — and am fitting AGITTOC things around the rest of life and work.)  So hopefully by Saturday morning this week, everything will be all set up to go, and next week loose ends can be tied up in advance of the first lecture.  Then the first lecture will be on Saturday June 27, 2020 — and this is the first date where this is now nearly a promise (i.e., I actually strongly expect this to work!).

The groups and groupoids should be ready to roll out by Saturday.  With the help of the shepherds, and using the information of everything people told me as of a few days ago, the groups are almost all made (quite bluntly), and will be put into groupoids hopefully by tomorrow morning.

There will be very roughly 5-7 groupoids, and everyone will be in one (even if they won’t do anything with that information).  Each groupoid will have an accompanying shepherd (and there may be a few floating shepherds because not every shepherd will watch every lecture).  The questions and discussion for the talk will be in the discord channels for those groupoids, and I’ll make those channels tomorrow hopefully.  On zulip, each group will have a private place to discuss, and also each groupoid will have a place to discuss.  I (or your shepherd) will get zulip invitations out hopefully no later than Saturday morning, and you can investigate and try things out, and also meet the others in your group.    (Of course, please be kind and also professional; the community standards of the Algebraic Geometry Syndicate are ones we’ll follow.)

Sheer volume of incoming AGITTOC-related emails and discord DMs and zulip @mentions means that it is a bad idea to ask me about smaller things, and I will be slow to answer or may not answer at all.  For this large experiment to work, you (really, we) will have to self-organize — ask questions in one of the public places (the #agittoc-general channel on AGS, or possibly the general channel on zulip), and also answer and discuss there.  And you can ask your shepherd too (but also only when particularly relevant — they are not TAs, for example).

How will your group work?  Let’s find out!  It would be good to be inclusive and friendly — even if there are a lot of differences.  Discussions might work well on discord — in that case you can just set up a group DM with each other (one of you will likely be able to figure out how).  Or you can use zulip or something else.  Whatever works.  (And later, others can learn from you what works.)

Unhappy with your group?  Nothing is set in stone.  Ideally the shepherds and I shouldn’t be bombarded with change requests.  If you’d requested to be in a group with someone and you weren’t, that wasn’t intentional — just let me know.  It was obvious in making the groups (many groups, in a small amount of time) that they were thrown together with some care, but not nearly as much as I’d like.

I of course have a bunch of AGITTOC-related things to respond to, and I also will (after Saturday) digest new forms.

So next post will hopefully announce the groups and groupoids going live.