| [eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee] EclipseCon and you, a program committee member |
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Program Committee, Well tomorrow is February 1st which means we're on the downhill slide towards the EclipseCon early registration deadline of Valentine's day, February 14th. And, thanks to you all, I honestly think that this year's program is our best one yet (best one ever?). Too bad the economy is looking gloomy for our best EclipseCon ever, but there are some things we just can't control! Calling All Attendees. One thing you want to be doing (need to be doing) is advertising your category and how great it is. It doesn't do the presenters much good if this is the best EclipseCon ever and nobody shows up to hear them talk. I've been blogging in the EclipseCon blog about the main stage talks and Scott is blogging about the keynotes, but you all should be doing similar things: blogs, emails, newsletters, dev lists, newsgroups, whatever the communication channels you use to talk to your community, these next two weeks are when you want to reach out and let them know that pre-Valentine's day is the time to register (and get the lower price). What's In It For You? One reason you want to be doing that is, as I mentioned before, we're using RFID tracking technology to track attendance in each session for 2009 and -- here's the important part -- we're going to use that data to allocate speaking slots next year. In other words, if we discover, through actual data, that category X is better attended than category Y, then category Y is going to be much smaller in 2010. (In fact, with the economy and all, EclipseCon 2010 itself is likely to be somewhat smaller, so category Y is going to end up quite a bit smaller.) Thus if you want *your category* to continue to have a good EclipseCon presence, it behooves you to advertise and recruit attendees for your category's sessions. Vett Those Talks. The second thing you want to be doing (need to be doing) is working with the presenters in your category, especially the tutorials and "big" talks, to improve the talks as much as possible. The number one complaint from previous EclipseCon's was that the speaker just read his/her slides, was boring, and that the whole talk was dull. The longer the session, the stronger the complaints, so our re-emerged four hour tutorials are our biggest weak spot... So that means that you need to get advance copies of your tutorials, work through them and then help the authors improve them into wildly wonderful packages of information transfer. Looking forward to seeing you on Sunday night at the PC get together and then all of the great tutorials and talks you have selected and improved Tuesday through Thursday. The rooms will be packed thanks to your outreach to your community and it will be a great EclipseCon all around. Thanks for your help, Bjorn (& Scott) --
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