Which is the right word to complete this series: KEK, Snowmass, Hamburg, ... ? Chicago of course! After the first three venues, the fourth General ILC Workshop (ILC08) will take place in Chicago this year, organised in conjunction with the 2008 Linear Collider Workshop LCWS. As in the past, the workshop is supposed to bring detector and accelerator communities together. Results and plans from both worlds will be discussed in several joint plenary sessions.

A preliminary agenda for LCWS is online.

Registration for the joint November workshop is open at www.linearcollider.org/lcws08. The early registration deadline is 1 October. The conference fee will increase after this date, so make sure to register soon. The organisers - Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northern Illinois University, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) - are currently working on a preliminary agenda.

The ILC08 part of the workshop is this year's main GDE collaboration meeting. It will concentrate of planning and progress of the goals defined for the Technical Design Phase (TDP), notably the superconducting RF programme and its test facilities, electron cloud work, plug compatibility, gradient developments, machine-detector interface questions and cost reduction studies. The ILC project managers have defined clear goals for the five days. They want the community to get an overview the status of the baseline and alternative machine designs and get discussions going on these. Together, the community will have a look at the coming milestones and priorities and try to improve the collaboration between groups and institutes.

You can find a more detailed list of the workshop goals, the working groups and their conveners here: ilcdoc.linearcollider.org/record/16731/files/ILC08_general_program_announcement.pdf. Contact the organisers with ideas and proposals now to make sure that they make it into the agenda. See you in Chicago in November!

-- Barbara Warmbein