Going to a conference …

You never know who you're going to meet when you go to a conference. My colleague Peter Rodgers works on information display using Euler diagrams - intelligent Venn diagrams, if you like - and conferences often remind me of this. Contacts and colleagues inhabit overlapping circles (or ellipses?), and today was no exception. I talked to people at the Erlang Factory in London whose overlap is

• Haskell: enthusiasts who have also come to an Erlang meeting;
• Student placements: from a company who used to take placement students from Kent;
• Research: can we do some work together? can they provide a case study?
• Intern: Purdue engineering student visiting the UK as an intern;
• Colleagues: Roberto Aloi, who worked on the E-learning KTP and now is working on the RELEASE project, and Francesco, co-author …
• Friends: I've been around the functional programming community for a while

While we can maintain existing relationships online, there's nothing yet to replace meeting someone face to face, though it may well happen, through global warming if nothing else.