On Saturday, January 5 2013 - the day immediately preceding the main ICS conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, we will be hosting the first (annual?) CooprFest workshop. The workshop is free to all, including students, professionals, and any interested Python hackers. The purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum at which users and developers of the Coopr open-source modeling and optimization library - co-developed by Sandia National Laboratories, University of California Davis, and Texas A&M University - can interact and exchange ideas, experiences (both good and bad!), and desires for enhancements and new functionality. Coopr contains two broadly known sub-packages: the Pyomo modeling library and the PySP library for stochastic programming.

The workshop will be held at the Eldorado Hotel and Spa, which is the main conference hotel. The workshop will be held from 10AM-5PM, and will be followed to an excursion to a local eatery.

We welcome contributions for talks, of any length, of any format. The only requirement is that the talk involve some component of Coopr, however indirect that connection may be! We specifically solicit contributions from students and users that are not core developers.

For those attendees interested in Coopr, but who are not presently users, we will be providing a one-hour introduction to and survey of Coopr. The workshop will conclude with a brainstorming session regarding near- and moderate-term plans for future Coopr functionality. So if you are interested in seeing a specific feature, be there!

Contributions, including a brief title, abstract, and expected talk length, should be directed to Jean-Paul Watson. The review process will be both informal and dictatorial. Contributions should be submitted no later than November 1, 2012.