Old Dog, New Tricks: writing and tales from @oisin

EclipseCon 2010 Program In The Bag

Jan 14, 2010

If you have been tracking the EclipseCon submission system, or tweets from @eclipsecon, or blog posts from Donald Smith, you will have noticed that the Program Committee have finalized the program for 2010.

We’ve rejected far, far more submissions than we accepted, and probably upset some people. Sorry about that. Lucky for me, I’m getting the positive mail and Donald is getting the grief. Just in case you wanted to know, the decision process went a bit like this:

  • the big list of submissions was reviewed - we set up small teams from the Program Committee to review based on tags assigned to the submissions to do this
  • each tag team did a full review of the abstracts in their tag area and came back to the group with the “must-haves”
  • we gathered all the “must-haves” into lists for each talk type and spent over eight hours arguing about which were the most appropriate to choose for the program
All during this period, talks were being shrunk in size, coalesced, moved around and generally acting like quicksand.

I need to offer many thanks to guys on the Program Committee for the big pile of work they put in over the weekly conference calls and the big push in the endgame. They are:

When these guys failed to reject your talk, I stepped in and did so. I’d also like to recognize the excellent contributions of two others who for one reason or another needed to withdraw from the committee: Gabe O’Brien provided great help and timely support in the extension and massaging of the various recondite figaries of the submission system.

If your talk has been accepted - good stuff, start making your slides and, more importantly, your demos. Resist the urge to crow about it on twitter, if you can. If your talk has not been accepted - we will have outside-program space as part of the Unconference in the evenings. If you are coming along to the conference, you will get a chance to pitch your project or work. We’ll roll out plans and guidelines on how that will come together over the next couple of weeks.

Keep working on your talks. You should know your own stats at this stage. It takes me a total of about twenty hours to prepare from scratch a mediocre forty-minute talk about something I know pretty well. To do a shorter and better-quality talk takes considerably longer.

See you in Santa Clara in March.