[eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee] Re: IBM speakers

[Bjorn Freeman-Benson <bjorn.freeman-benson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At any rate, Bjorn, I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that we should reject all presentations by IBMers, ...

Goodness no! I just want to make sure that we've considered the issue so that we end up with a great program for the attendees.

I can't speak for all of IBM, but I will say that for the Jazz and Eclipse teams we've already been doing a fair amount of self-censoring of proposals, based on our projections of how many people we're going to be able to send, prior to the submission actually being put into the EclipseCon system.  And exactly for the reasons that we don't want a proposal accepted only to have to pull it later.  

Thanks, Kevin (and the hidden rest of you all), that's very reassuring.

Not to speak negatively of other companies, but only to say that we the program committee face a higher than usual risk associated with attendance at this year's conference and we need to plan for that.

That's correct, but the aforementioned three-letter company is the only one so far whose employees have said "I'm not going to be able to come because I didn't get travel approval". Maybe that has been true for other companies and none of them have been honest enough to tell me directly - obviously, I have no way of knowing that.

We've had a good track record of yes-shows (non no-shows) at EclipseCon over the years: a few due to family illnesses and an expected percent who decided that a short talk wasn't worth the trip -- I'd like us to make sure that we keep it that way so that we don't have upset attendees saying "I came for tutorial/talk X and now it was canceled at the last minute!".

- Bjorn

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