Dear Branch member,

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We hope to see you at our April meeting next week, and please make a note of a very special talk at our meeting on May 24th.

What topics would you like to see on next year's meeting programme? We'd love to hear from you.

Ruby on Rails was top of Computerworld's March list of Five Technologies You Need to Know about in 2007. Jonathan Conway of New Bamboo Web Development will show us why it's fast becoming the framework of choice for the new generation of Web 2.0 developers.
This is a joint meeting with the BCS Open Source and Internet Specialist Groups.
Thanks to the OSSG we are pleased to offer you cheese and a glass of wine before the meeting.

It's still not too late to enter. Teams have until the closing date of 30 April to submit their entries for this year's Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition and a chance to win some great prizes.
If you have any questions, check the FAQ or ask us on the contact form.

This year's fascinatingly titled BCS/RSI Annual Lecture will be given by Professor Rodney Brooks, Panasonic Professor of Robotics and Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The lecture is free of charge and open to non-members as well as members. For more details see www.bcs.org/rsi.

We are delighted to have Derek Turner CBE, National Traffic Operations Director at the Highways Agency, as the speaker at our AGM in May. Derek, who was previously Transport for London's Managing Director of Street Management and the chief architect of the Congestion Charge, is ideally placed to tell us about the technical and the political challenges faced, and lessons learned in delivering and getting the citizen to accept the congestion charge and similar schemes.

The Congestion Charge scheme had at its centre a highly successful IT project exploiting many technologies, and road user charging schemes are clearly being considered for wider deployment in the UK.

This event is being organised in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute.

We're just starting to work on our meeting programme for 2007-8.

Any ideas? If you have any requests or, better still, would like to volunteer a talk, do let us know by replying to this email or by adding a comment to the branch wiki programme page, where you can also see suggestions received so far.

If you weren't able to get to the 2007 Lovelace Lecture by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, you can watch it online.

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