(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.)

A brief update (mainly for my own benefit): things still seem on track for this Saturday being the first pseudolecture. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be able to test the zoom/youtube combination for the first time (thanks to Dev Sinha). Having notes available in almost real-time is ready to go (thanks to Yufei Zhao).

If you signed up long ago and haven’t heard from me, it may be because you mistyped your email address (there are more than a few people in this boat) or because I’ve messed something up. In either case, please drop me a line.

If you can’t access youtube because of your location, or if you can’t access some other thing we use (wordpress? but then you aren’t reading this. discord?), also let me know. The plan remains that most people watch on youtube live (details later when I figure them out) and ask questions through zulip; shepherds and those who can’t use youtube are on zoom, and shepherds will ask those questions on zulip that they particularly find useful. Annotated past slides will be viewable in your browser in almost-real-time.

I want to thank those of you who gave out AGITTOC numbers in bulk on the first day they went out — it made a huge task quite reasonable, and actually fun. So I still need to go back and make sure I have a complete list, so I can list you all here!

There are many people I’m gradually moving through the process of “onboarding” (signing up, AGITTOC#, discord, working group, zulip). There are about ten people signed up earlier where there are things I’ve not sorted out. I’m mainly focused on making Saturday happen right now, but want to still get this stuff done before long.

There’s some discussion among the shepherds as to whether shepherds is the best name (or perhaps something else, e.g. field marshal, guide, liaison, invertible shepherd). No consensus yet; feel free to weigh in on this oh-so-important issue. (Best working group: perhaps “invertible sheep”. But that is a pun that only a minority of you should be able to get, so “invertible shepherds” is a less good name than I first thought it might be…)

Erik Demaine is actually on our zulip, and told us there about his https://cocreate.csail.mit.edu/ which looks like a super-handy shareable whiteboard — feel free to check it out. (I haven’t yet, but will.) Some groups are also meeting on coauthor, so I will be curious to see how they use it.

(I expect that this entire AGITTOC experiment will take a lower proportion of my time in future weeks, once the machine is fully in motion. The real bulk of the work was before, in getting people into groups.)