The "Cartel" is a chance for key technical staff in the distributed computing and networking areas to get together to compare notes, talk shop, discuss common problems and solutions, and generally broaden their horizons. It differs from some other groups by having fewer schools participating (currently 6: CMU, Cornell, Michigan, MIT, Stanford, and Washington) and trying to include a broader range of technical staff.
See the Cartel "Rules" for the extremely informal rules under which the group operates.
See the MIT Cartel home page for some info about the group's history and some past agendas. See the Cartel 1999 pages for info about last year's event at Cornell.