From: eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Donald Smith
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 8:15 AM
To: 'Eclipsecon Program Committee list'
Subject: RE: [eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee] Category
Revisions
I have somehow got myself completely out of sorts – was there
not supposed to be a call this morning? I was on, but it did not seem to
happen.
I just assumed that Business & Industry were 3 hours each,
so a total of 6h. Last year there were only a few shorts, and it didn’t
seem to attract many folks. Given the reduction in the program, going
from 7 (5biz+2ind) to 6 didn’t seem bad to me, given I still think we have 50%
too many talks allocated. ;-)
-
Don
Kevin,
Nice pickup there. Originally there were two categories: one for
Business, another for Industry. Somewhere along the line I transposed or
collapsed the categories. For some reason I thought that each category
had 5 shorts and 2 longs for a total of 6 hours of Bus. & Ind.
I would propose taking one long talk from TPTP and giving it to Business &
Industry. Does that make it better? Does anyone else have a long
talk that they would like to donate to business and industry?
Scott
Kevin McGuire wrote:
(btw, that
email was queued since last week but was travelling and couldn't get access to
email, so sorry it came after the call)
Agree.
The allocations need to reflect:
1) the topics
for which people will submit talks
2) what is of
interest to the community
I've never done
this before, but I wonder though if there's a tendency to fill the time
allocations.
Wrt the
business track, the one talk I went to was packed beyond capacity (Tim
Wagner's). What I liked about his talk was that it got me thinking of
something I wouldn't have otherwise. This happy surprise learning is what I
always hope for in a conference. We're a technical crowd for sure but we
all also make a living at it, so if the talks are quality then I'd imagine some
interest is there (and Tim's suggests there is). Plus there's lots in the
community, some on this very mail list, who consult, do courses, etc., so its
not like we don't have people with a (vested) business interest on the floor
already.
EclipseWorld is
a whole other thing and many of us don't go. I'd just like to ensure that we're
not accidentally missing out on another important aspect of Eclipse, one which
is essential to its long term health. As an aside, sometimes I think we
regard "business" as a dirty word in Eclipse!
With such a
small allocation, I wonder if its self fulfilling, and we subconsciously don't
encourage the submissions of this topic? (Again, new at this, and no slight
intended to the past owners of this topic).
Kevin
yeah, it is hard to get these allocations right. One approach is to treat
the current numbers as guidelines/current thinking. With the global focus
on having really great talks, there is no point, for example, in accepting
mediocre talks just because well ahead time we thought it would be good to have
N hours of topic T.
Jeff
Ed Merks wrote:
Kevin,
I agree with some of the concerns about allocations. But I know that the
reporting newsgroup has among the highest traffic of all the newsgroups while
SOA and TPTP seem to generate only a trickle. I'm not sure that's a
reflective of how many folks would turn out for related talks though.
Chris and I did a committer track talk last year and the turnout was
quite small. If slots are in short supply, ones focused on technical
material seem to be a better use, in my opinion. I also agree with you
about the business thing, but I wonder about the conference audience itself.
For example, I imagine that Eclipse World would have a much larger draw
to a business track focus while EclipseCon has a much smaller business crowd to
draw on. I have no real factual basis for that comment though.
Perhaps we've done surveys about the demographics of the audience?
There's no point in having business-focused talks if the geeks stay away
in droves. I get the sense that C++ is extremely popular (again from the
newsgroup traffic) but I wonder about it being equal to that of Java. At
the same time, is there all that much to say about Java that hasn't been said?
I suppose that for any of these things, if the slots are really over allocated,
that will become clear by the number of quality submissions; unused slots will
be obviously redistributed...
Kevin McGuire wrote:
- I'm happy with Platform ext and
Platform int.
- I like the broad categorizations.
- The overall ext splits seems good
- 8hrs seems a lot for Reporting
which is just one specific area (e.g. compared to SOA at 9hr which could
be massive). Same comment for Test and Performance at 10.
- Note sure what happens in 8hrs
for committer and contributor, seems high.
- Meanwhile,
business and industry seems under represented at mere 3hrs, which could be
quite broad. Eclipse is only successful if it can be applied
commercially (so we can all continue to get paid :>). I'm thinking
things like success stories or challenges in building commercial Eclipse
based applications, industry comparisons and trends, etc. Is the issue
here of audience, or that we tend not to get submissions in this area?
Overall happy, the only one I feel at all strongly about is Business and
Industry.
Kevin
All,
I think we reached consensus that it would be a good idea to have a simplified
version of the external description of the EclipseCon categories. I have
re-worked the category descriptions a bit and filled in some misses from the
first round. The re-worked categories are up on the spread-sheet
plus I have just copied them into the email for your convenience.
At this point, I just want to work with total hours of presentation time, once
we get agreement that the categories are correctly named and we have the
allocations appropriately balanced, I will take a stab at the Tutorial, Long,
Main Stage, and Short Talk allocations. If you feel your category is not
getting appropriate representation, now is the time to speak up.
NOTE: I added 8 hours to the total to take in account the addition of the Linux
DevCon
Additional questions:
1) Do the External Category Descriptions (first column in Bold) make
sense?
2) Do we have the right balance between the various External Categories?
3) Did I miss any internal categories?
4) Do the internal category names make sense?
5) Is the balance good for the internal categories?
Finally, I wanted to share a personal milestone with all of you. Today
was our last big "First Day Of School". Both of my kids, Sam
(pre-k) and Louise (1st grade) are now in school. Like most proud
parents we had to take a picture, nice photo except for the goon in the blue
shirt.
scott
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