How It Works

The group meets weekly, as detailed on the Overview page, but tends to disband outside of term-time when attendance levels drop.

Notification of meetings and any follow-on discussion happen on our mailing list, which members should therefore get themselves added to.

To expand a bit on the types of things people have discussed (and to stress the informality) below are some sample generic topics:

• "I read this paper on X which has major idea Y that seems very provocative / at odds with major idea Z. My current thinking is ...; what do you guys think?" or
• "I'm starting to model X and I aim to explore Y. I've tentatively chosen a general architecture Z using paradigms A and B. What are the pros and cons of doing it this way, and how does this relate to other literature you know of?"
• "I've started using tool X which seems really good for doing Y. I want to show you a quick demo and discuss how this relates to other tools."
• "I keep seeing mention of concept X but papers A,B and C all seem to interpret it differently. My take is ...; how do you guys view it?"

Committee

There is an informal committee, currently of 3 members (mixing PhD students and staff). We try to make sure that at least one committee member is at each meeting to coordinate things, and each committee member comes 'armed' with a fallback topic for discussion to use if needed. (They will also try to advertise this beforehand if the meeting doesn't have a scheduled discussion-leader.)

Currently this committee is:

Stuart Rossiter (ECS / Social Sciences Research Fellow)

Lewys Brace (ECS PhD Student)

Iza Romanowska (ECS / Archaeology PhD Student)

We ideally need a couple more committee members (we originally had 5); if anyone is interested, please drop us an email.

'Rules'

We have a (very loose!) set of 'rules' to try to encourage the type/style of discussion we would like.

1. We'd like members to try and present on some aspect of their own work once a year, and volunteer to lead discussion on one other topic of interest (which could involve organising an external speaker) in the year. This is absolutely non-binding and will not be checked! The idea is just to ensure that we have a good spread of discussion that cover members' interests, and don't have too many no-agenda meetings.

2. Don't require any preparation for your discussion from attendees. If, say, you're discussing a paper, give a summary in the first 5 mins. Of course, feel free to send out material beforehand on the mailing list for those who might want to read up beforehand.

3. Try to create a welcoming and stimulating environment for speakers. Because we want to encourage open-ended and sometimes 'fuzzy' discussions across disciplines, we should expect that there will be ideas which will challenge our underlying theoretical or methodological beliefs, or are done in isolation of seemingly-relevant areas elsewhere. Having stimulating, respectful discussion which brings out some of these implicit things is one of the aims of the group.

4. To help set expectations, below is a very rough 'frame' for aspects of models that members are likely to be interested in (loosely adapted from ODD):

• model purpose;
• entities and processes in the model;
• design concepts (e.g., core social theory);
• use of data (both for model inputs/structure and validation);
• model initialisation (how and with what data?);
• model validation (how and with what data?).

This doesn't mean having to structure talks like this (though that might be a good idea), but it is a guide for the kinds of questions that are likely to be asked, and the aspects that people are likely to want to know about to understand your model properly and cover their particular areas of interest.

Of course, some discussions won't be about single models and so the above might not be relevant.