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There's always going to be more presentations than slots to
give them. So how about this idea:
1. Accept an unlimited number of quality presentations. Put
all of them on the web site[1].
2. Give a limited number of the presentations live at the
conference. The live ones would be specially marked and schedulable of course,
but other than that they would be equal to the non-live
ones.
So what we're currently doing is figuring out which ones
should be given live. But instead of "declining" all the rest, we could have an
intermediate kind of "accept" that means we want them to be part of the
conference knowledgebase, just not given live.
Let's face it, the number of people physically attending a
conference is *far* outweighed by the number of people who are interested in the
material and read / listen / view it online. I would guess the ratio is over 100
to 1.
With this idea the "accept for live presentation" decision
is more like deciding whether you want to go see a movie vs. renting it and
watching it home later. Do you get something from the big screen experience?
Similarly, which presentations would benefit the listeners most who are there
live?
[1]: "On the web site" means at a minimum there is a
downloadable slideshow. But richer media is an option if the presenter wants to
supply it, such as audio, screencast, or video.
+1 on
60à45min for long talks
so that we can accept more.
It’s a tough question
– there’s a huge amount of value in keeping a single, yearly conference, but
it necessarily means that we’re bringing together some fairly disparate
interests, and all of them require some minimal level of representation. FWIW,
I think a tightly packed program is still better than the alternatives so long
as it’s possible to attend what you’re interested in. (My big complaint about
JavaOne isn’t that it’s a large program, but that they make it hard to read
the program (and thus find what you’re interested in seeing) and then you
often can’t get into the popular talks anyway without lining up an hour or
more in advance. I hope we can avoid those problems in
EclipseCon…)
In terms of future
breakdowns, I’m a fan of domains for several reasons: presenters usually know
what area they’re in, attendees often come with a list of topics they want to
learn more about, and PC members can rely on top-level projects or other
domain-based groups to help provide expert advice within such buckets. Some
special categories operate similarly – for instance, we had the RCP and
embedded “themes” this year, business is a special case, and “newbie” might be
as well. It’s also an easier way to make progress as a program committee –
reading every submission is increasingly daunting, so breaking down into
separate groups (assuming the allocation can be worked out) feels more
scalable as a process.
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