Re: [eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee] Well, this isn't what I s

[brian.fitzpatrick@xxxxxxxxxx]

Ok... So regardless of how this boils
down, I see John's POV as well as Bjorn's POV.

From a scheduling perspective, it is
a royal pain (as Bjorn's detailed examples proved). 

But from a presenter standpoint... John
is right as well. It can be tough to fill a 4 hour tutorial with enough
juicy content to keep your attendees from going to sleep. And nothing is
going to keep attendees from escaping one tutorial and popping into another
to check it out (and repeating the process multiple times over the course
of 8 hours of tutorials to choose from).

Where does that leave me and DTP? It
leaves me with no tutorial to fill my slot. The DTP PMC discussed today
ways to remedy the situation, since we feel a tutorial slot is mandatory
for us to keep promoting DTP and getting the word out. We will be submitting
a separate tutorial proposal with multiple presenters in a day or two.


From my perspective, at a conference,
I'd rather have too many choices than too few. Two hour tutorials would
not only allow a presenter enough time to work through one topic really
well, but it's also about as long as any of us really want to sit in a
room before we have to get up and walk around to get blood flow going again.

Hate to rock the boat a little, but
even though I understand the trouble with scheduling these tutorials, I
think we're doing a bit of an injustice to our conference attendees by
assuming that we're making this too tough for them to comprehend and choose
among their options. I'm not saying we ditch 4 hour tutorials, but a mix
of 2 and 4 hour tutorials could work if we had more than a couple.

That said, we will submit a late tutorial
proposal to retain our DTP slot and keep on chugging.

--Fitz

Brian Fitzpatrick
Eclipse Data Tools Platform PMC Chair
Eclipse Data Tools Platform Connectivity Team Lead
Staff Software Engineer, Sybase, Inc.

Bjorn Freeman-Benson <bjorn.freeman-benson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

12/02/2008 01:26 PM

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Subject	[eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee] Well, this isn't what I        said...

PC members,
See John's bitter comment below. Please note that my objection to 2-hour
tutorials was about having only two 2-hour tutorials, not about 2-hour
tutorials in general. Here's the situation:

We have 20 parallel tutorials going on at the same time. Thus at 8am, T1,
T2, T3, ..., T10, T11, T12, ..., T19, T20 all start at the same time. They
all end at noon.  Then, at 1pm, we have T21, T22, ..., T39, T40 all
starting at the same time and all ending at 5pm.

If we have *one* of the slots divided into two 2-hour tutorials, we have:
8am T1, T2, ..., T20 start
10am T1 ends and T21 starts
noon T2, ..., T20, T21 end
1pm T22, ..., T41 start
5pm T22, ..., T41 end
>From the attendees point of view, they can either attend T1 and then
T21 or they can attend any of T2, ..., T20. In other words, the two 2-hour
tutorials are not offering the attendees any choice: they are still locked
into the T1-T21 block because at the end of T1 there is no other choice
of what to attend next.

However, if we had, say, 10 of the slots turned into 2x2-hour tutorials,
then there would be choice at 10am: in fact, there would be ten choices
of what to take next.
8am T1, ..., T20 start
10am T1, ..., T10 end and T21, ..., T30 start
noon T11, .., T30 end
1pm T31, ..., T50 start
5pm T31, ..., T50 end

So, if the program committee wants to have enough 2-hour tutorial slots
so as to provide a choice to the attendees, I'll be +1.  But if it's
just one or two slots being divided into 2x2-hours, I'm against it because
it's bad for the attendees.

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	EC 2009 581: What happened to Database Refactoring?
Date:	Tue, 2 Dec 2008 15:17:03 -0500 (EST)
From:	info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (portal on behalf of info)
To:	bjorn.freeman-benson@xxxxxxxxxxx

John Graham (2008-12-02 15:16:32) wrote:
Withdrawing this proposal since I understand that the PC is not willing
to
consider 2 hour tutorials, despite earlier indications to the contrary.
Disappointed that no good reasons seem to be offered for this limitation,
and I wonder how many good sessions will be eliminated as a result of this
arbitrary change of policy.

https://www.eclipsecon.org/submissions/2009/view_talk.php?id=581



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