Jon Bagger, chair of the LCSGA Communication Committee

The Linear Collider Steering Group Americas (LCSGA) Communications Committee is planning a half-day workshop for the afternoon of 18 July 2006 in conjunction with the Vancouver Linear Collider Workshop (VLWC).

The goal of this workshop is to train an "ILC communications squad" to give talks to scientific (both HEP and non-HEP) audiences.  Interest in the ILC is growing quickly.  Barry Barish cannot satisfy all the requests he gets for colloquia and seminars.  We need to continue to build a concensus for the ILC both inside and outside the HEP community.  The aim of this workshop is to provide participants with the tools they will need to put together a good ILC colloquium as well as to provide them with material, strategies and means to keep these up to date.

The session will start with an introduction explaining why this is necessary, our target audiences and how we identified likely participants. This would be followed by a discussion of the different levels of ILC talk we imagine might be given.  Their target audiences would range from non-ILC high energy physicists, to non-HEP physicists and even to the general public.  There are a variety of resources that have been produced over the last year (Discovering the Quantum Universe, the ILC/LHC physics comparison, the EPP2010 report, etc.)

Following the two or three talks outlined above we plan to break into smaller discussion groups brainstorming for ideas, examples (that could be gathered together on a central website) and counter-examples (what not to do when spreading the ILC message).  The workshop would conclude with reports from these working groups.

We hope you will be able to join us at this workshop the day before the VLWC meeting this summer.

LCSGA Communication Committee

Jonathan Bagger
Jim Brau
Neil Calder
Judy Jackson
Ritchie Patterson
William Trishuk