Minutes from the meeting of January 24, 1996:

Furniture: In the week of January 29, Josh and others are going to the SAS Warehouse to (hopefully) get some furniture for the house. Please e-mail Josh with any ideas or suggestions.

Supplies: Shawn is currently making up a list of short-term necessity-like items we would like to request reimbursement for. Please let her know of any ideas or suggestions.

Al is bringing Judith Rodin through the house on Monday night. It will be a quick visit, on her way to Chats.

We discussed the wall in the main room again, since the last event was again very crowded. Especially after the architect's report on fire safety, it looks like we will take the walls down and put doors between the foyer and the main cafe area. We are also considering the possibility of a mini-sprinkler flood barrier in place of doors.

Josh is working on models for visiting resident writers. Laura and Marc are working on similar models for community partnerships, written plans which we will put onto our homepage.

We started discussing big plans for the September opening, including a Dinner, Reading, Dedication program. We would like to get a big shot of local significancd (i.e. John Wideman) to help us celebrate. At some point, we will also need to divide up tasks -- i.e. one person will handle *all* dinners that we host, etc.

We need to start reaching out especially to schools beyond SAS -- Wharton, Engineering, Nursing, etc. This will be especially important since all of the Deans will be deciding whether the *entire* university needs this program. One suggestion was that we have Dean Farrington from Engineering come and speak about the information age & writing, information technology, web publishing, etc. in conjunction with the ENIAC celebration. "Hooking up" the house for an event like this may be difficult, though.

Finally, we begun tossing around ideas for a "Big Bash" event this semester, pre-April, that would celebrate a larger sense of writing than just readings could do. We came up with: inviting well-known professors from all across the university to read some of their own writing on an evening in late March, most likely a Thursday night. This could possibly turn into an all-night event, "Culture Never Sleeps," where Penn writers are scheduled to read all night long. It was suggested that Shawn could read from 3 a.m. until noon, but though she thinks the suggestion was humorous, this idea was declined.

Minutes taken by Shawn Lynn Walker