Christopher Meiklejohn

Today, I’m pleased to announce the beta launch of my new project, called Proceedings.

To put it simply, Proceedings is your graduate school reading group, brought online using video chat.

As a gradaute student, I’ve noticed a few things regarding existing reading groups:

• Lack of archival; if you miss a meeting, you have no way to get a good handle on the discussion that happened.
• Lack of participants; people forget, people get lazy and computer science departments are small and may not have many students that share similar interests.

So, what are the ultimate goals of the service?

• Provide a way for users all over the globe to participate in discussions about interesting academic papers.
• Provide archived recordings of these discussions so they can be viewed by anyone, at any time.
• Allow anyone to register a reading group on a particular topic, and start having discussions.
• Make it dead simple, so you don’t have to worry about coordination of paper selection and organization of members at a specific time.
• Providing a way for people in industry to participate with academics and have meaningful discussions.

Proceedings is a direct spin off of the Think Distributed Podcast, based on feedback from our many listeners. Because of this, we’ll be running a limited invitation only beta focusing on distributed systems literature.

Head on over to Proceedings to check it out and sign up for the beta, we’re aiming to have our first discussion on November 15th.