**Note** from Bead: Netlogo User Conference 2026 · [canonical source](https://redfish.acequia.io/guerin/.agents/0a0d4bbc-5310-486b-97af-0e16646347a4/2026-06-20/notes/00-panel-orientation.md) · session 2026-06-20 · discussion: Talk: Netlogo User Conference 2026
## The brief (from Jacob) - **When:** Monday June 29, 2026, 4:15–5:15pm - **Where:** University of Illinois **Chicago** (UIC, *not* U of Chicago), Student Center East, 750 S Halsted St, Chicago IL 60607, room 605 - **Schedule:** Google Sheet (tabs per day + speaker list) — https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nt6sKnvrsHvnqZHr2wy85uK5TQocy-HIbeBNYXIyz48/edit?gid=1177500188 **Format (60 min):** - **First 25 min** — general intro, then each panelist ~5 min on their company. *No slides.* - **Middle 15 min** — Jacob asks a few questions; panelists may ask each other questions. - **Last 20 min** — audience Q&A. **Jacob's two planned questions:** 1. What is your strategy for commercializing ABMs and why? Options: (1) general simulation/analytics platform; (2) domain/vertical-specific ABM for multiple companies; (3) one-off tailored solutions for specific companies. 2. What obstacles have you faced getting your ABM product/service adopted, and how did you overcome them? **Jacob's ask:** "any further ideas to improve the panel or suggestions to improve the questions."
## The gravity of this event This is the **first** NetLogo Users Conference, convened because Uri Wilensky is aging and holds an **NSF grant to make NetLogo self-sustaining** beyond its founder. Succession/sustainability is the hidden through-line of everything. The industry panel is the room's best chance to answer: *can a commercial ecosystem help an open academic ABM tool outlive its creator?* Stephen — Redfish/Simtable, deep NetLogo/SFI lineage, AgentScript (web-native ABM in the NetLogo tradition) — is unusually well placed to make that connection.
## The 5 vectors of response to Jacob Each vector is a thing Stephen can write back. Tagged **[panel]** (format) or **[question]** (improving Jacob's questions), several do both. ### Vector 1 — Make the conference's own existential question a panel question **[question]** The planned questions are generic "how do you commercialize ABM." But the reason we're all in the room is making NetLogo self-sustaining as Uri steps back. Add an explicit question: > *"What would it take for NetLogo — and ABM tooling generally — to become self-sustaining, and what is industry's role and responsibility in that?"* This connects the industry panel directly to the NSF grant's mission, gives the academic audience the answer they actually came for, and is far more memorable than another commercialization roundtable. (Model: how Linux/Python/Postgres got sustained — companies funding the commons because their products sit on it.) ### Vector 2 — Q1 is a false trichotomy; reframe it as a path, not a pick **[question]** The three options (platform / vertical / bespoke) are presented as mutually exclusive. In practice successful ABM companies *move through* them — land a bespoke engagement, generalize it to a vertical product, abstract the reusable core into a platform — or run all three at once as a portfolio. Suggest reframing: > *"How has your product shape evolved over time across bespoke → vertical → platform, and what triggered each move?"* Sharper still: the real strategic axis isn't product *shape*, it's **where the defensible value sits** — in the model, the calibration data, the domain expertise, or the decision-support wrapper. Worth probing. ### Vector 3 — Add the trust/validation gap; it's distinct from adoption **[question]** Q2 asks about adoption obstacles, but the deepest ABM-specific obstacle deserves its own question: **how do you get a decision-maker to trust a simulation?** Validation, calibration to real data, communicating uncertainty, and "all models are wrong" in a procurement context. ABM faces this more acutely than ML/stats because its mechanisms are visible and contestable. Suggest: > *"How do you build trust in a model — validation, calibration, uncertainty — when the buyer's instinct is 'it's just a simulation'?"* ### Vector 4 — Give the no-slides intros a shared spine + one live artifact **[panel]** Five unscripted 5-min intros risk sameness and abstraction. Hand every panelist the **same 3-prompt spine** so the audience can hold them side by side: > *(1) what you simulate, (2) who pays and why, (3) one war story (a win or a faceplant).* And consider allowing **one shared live-model moment** rather than pure talking heads — for a NetLogo crowd, *seeing* industry-grade ABM run lands harder than describing it. (Stephen can bring a running AgentScript/Simtable model as that artifact if a screen is available.) ### Vector 5 — Engineer the Q&A and treat the panel itself as a sympoietic system **[panel]** 20 minutes of cold audience Q&A often stalls or gets hijacked. Three moves: - **Seed 2–3 questions in advance** — especially the one the academic audience (students, postdocs) actually carries: *"is there a living to be made doing ABM in industry?"* That question directly serves NetLogo's sustainability (the training → industry → contribute-back loop). - **Close with a "one ask to academia / one ask from academia" round** so the panel produces actionable bridges, not just war stories. - **Design for emergence, not sequential monologue** — explicitly license cross-panel disagreement; the most useful signal for the audience is where five practitioners *don't* agree.
## Read order for a denovo agent 1. This note (brief + 5 vectors). 2. `about.md` for bead identity/lifecycle. 3. Chat log in `chats/` for verbatim asks.