Being CS

ISIS Retreat

Friday and Saturday have been great. Tristan, Greg and I went to the ISIS retreat in Monterey. Just driving down there in a car with 5 people was an experience (we travelled with fellow ISIS members Phil and Kimberly). Our house was right at the sea and had an amazing view. Tristan and me immediately sat down by the bay window and started coding for CS 147. More people arrived soon and people started playing with Lego and PlayDo, talking to each other, getting to know the new people and building a puzzle.
Many of us had laptops (I'm blogging this from Tristan's car) and we even brought the ISIS server along so we could have access to the ISIS blog (unfortunately this did not work for the Mac for some weird reason).
Dinner was prepared by the people from the Stanford Cooking club who happened to be on the ISIS team and lots of interesting conversations were going on during dinner. People kept spilitting up into small groups and talking about topics, but others would then wander off and talk to other groups and very interesting dynamics evolved. I talked to last year's Gavilan HPAC and Tristan and Greg.
I also had an intersting conversation with Scott, Kyle, Bob, Tristan about the future of laptops and similar gadgets.
After that we convened into a big group to talk about the future of ISIS, where to go from here and how to make sure that ISIS goes on once Steve and Kyle leave. We came up with many core values for ISIS and afterwards decided to have a sessions about blogging, and the ISIS blog. One of our most important points is that we should build stuff that we could have people use outside of ISIS, and only work on projects that we would actually like to use ourselves.
I also realized that ISIS is not just about events.stanford.edu, and that most of the actual time-intensive work is done by the University, but ISIS is responsible for coming up with all the cool ideas and figuring out how to make them work in the real world.