Smalltalk Solutions is coming up in June - Registration has been open for awhile now (yes, we are aware that you might be surprised by our efficiency this year :). Interested in sponsoring the show? You can sign up as a sponsor here. Bear in mind that STIC members get a discount - sign up for STIC as an individual member here Participants in the Coding Contest - the finalists attending the conference will be eligible for a discount. You can sign up now, and STIC will reimburse you after the conference. See at in Reno!

The 2008 Smalltalk Solutions Coding Contest has begun. You can get the details at Niall Ross' blog, with the specifics listed in this post. You can go straight to the contest details below:

• The Contest Overview
• A Zip Archive of the Contest Documents
• Contest schedule and details

Good luck to all who enter! Questions? Send them to Niall Ross

2008 has started as successful for Smalltalk as 2007 ended. In December the conference Smalltalks -2007 in Argentina had almost 300 participants (see http://www.dc.uba.ar/events/smalltalks/2007). In January at OOP 2008 Conference in Munich a Smalltalk solution won the Dynamic Languages Shootout of Java Spektrum magazine, against 10 other dynamic languages. The winner software can be downloaded here. The winner used an almost sixty year old algorithm called Trie, implemented clever in Cincom Smalltalk.

The next big Smalltalk event will be organized by STIC, Smalltalk Industry Council: Smalltalk Solutions 2008 in Reno. Nevada June 18-21, 2008.

The call for papers is out. Please send us your submissions until March 1st, 2008. As a speaker you will get a special conference fee of US$160 for STIC members and US$200 for non STIC members.

We have already won very excellent speakers for Smalltalk Solutions 2008, including David Simmons, Gilad Bracha and Randal Schwartz.

Certainly your organization is invited to become a Gold Sponsor or a Silver Sponsor of Smalltalk Solutions 2008. This will enable you to promote your products and services to the Smalltalk market.

I am looking forward to seeing you in Reno in June 2008 and learn about your successes in Smalltalk

Georg Heeg

STIC - Smalltalk Industry Council
Executive Director

The STIC Board has re-elected Bob Cherniak as STIC Treasurer. Bob is founder of Cherniak Software Development Corporation, Toronto, Canada, http://www.cherniaksoftware.com.

I am really happy that Bob volunteered to take this task again. In the last year Bob’s main task was to clean up the STIC financial status and to get it up-to-date. The next task will be to install membership and conference registration software. As STIC has taken back full control over Smalltalk Solutions again, additional tasks will arise for our treasurer.

I am looking forward to continue working with Bob.

Georg Heeg
STIC – Smalltalk Industry Council
Executive Director

All STIC officers are elected for one year. Now it is time to (re-)elect the treasurer. As STIC has decided to organize Smalltalk-Solutions on our own budget the amount of work and the resposibility is much higher that last years.

Here is the task list we have come up with:

1. A treasurer shall take care of all financial transactions of the STIC organization.
2. A treasurer must be a trustful person and needs to work with few errors (most of them  will come to surface anyway and produce double work)
3. A treasurer shall keep all books about financial transactions and financial status.
4. A treasurer should work in timely manner.
5. Tasks of the treasurer

• Membership handling (automated renewal payment process)
• Smalltalk Solutions 2008 registration and payment (automated process)
• the treasurer will have to deal with a payment processing company to set up STIC to be able to take credit cards
  Payment of STIC duties (more then before as we will run our conference ourselves)
• Modify the membership database to reflect all membership and conference attendance transactions so that all ionformation can be retrieved from this data source including participant lists, badge production, …

Voluteer to take this highly responsible job in supporting Smalltalk, please e-mail to georg@stic.st.

Georg Heeg
STIC - Smalltalk Industry Council
Executive Director

At ESUG in Lugano I presented STIC - Smalltalk Industry Council as lobby organization for Smalltalk. At the end of the presentation a strong wish was articulated to give members of the greater Smalltalk community a voice inside STIC.

In the last month we discussed about this approach on the board of directors and as a result of this I found today STIC Smalltalk Community Committee according to Article VI of the STIC bylaws. The role of this committee shall be to create communication among the different Smalltalk user groups and other important players including the STIC board. Membership is by appointment through the STIC Executive Director. So please send an e-mail to georg@stic.st to express your interest.

Members of the STIC Advisory Committee shall be

• all STIC board members (they are already appointed)
• important players in the Smalltalk World e.g. representatives of Seaside,  Squeak, ESUG, Smalltalk X, Dolphin, ... 

The committee shall have one phone conference per month/quarter and meet at Smalltalk Solutions and ESUG.

Georg Heeg
STIC - Smalltalk Industry Council
Executive Director

STIC - Smalltalk Indytry Council proudly annouces the launch of its new web site www.stic.st.

In the name of the entire STIC board, I thank the stic web team for their work. Certainly we all count on them on keeping the web site up to date.

We (STIC) want to make this web site the central focus point for information around Smalltalk. All of you who want to contribute information and/or have web contents which is releavant for Smalltalk (both for strangers as well as for Smalltalkers), please let us know.

Georg Heeg
STIC - Smalltalk Industry Council
Executive Director