[OSCon 2005 guidelines] what talks to submit

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To remind: OSCON will be August 1-5 in Portland, OR.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/

It is moving to the Oregon Convention Center, a much (MUCH) larger venue 
with significantly larger rooms for all tracks.  No more being banished to 
the third floor slums!

As I have mentioned earlier the possibility of having a mod_perl track is 
back. But it'll only become true, if you submit enough talks. We want to 
build an interesting and a complete mod_perl track. So please read on.

This year the OSCon is done in a different way.  The theme is "The
New Paradigm", and we're planning to feature projects and case studies
that reflect the changes Tim describes in his "New Open Source
Paradigm" paper 
<http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource/paradigmshift_0504.html>;.  In short,
the trends he identifies are:
  * an open source system commoditizes that area of the software market,
enabling people to build things on top of it and charge for it.  His
example is Linux enabling Google.
  * network-enabled collaboration, both in the form of Rendezvous-like
local services and in the form of data services like Amazon
reviews/recommendations and eBay (where the value's not in the auction
software, but in the userbase and the data they're contributed).  Tim's
phrase for the data services is "architecture of
participation"--they're designed to involve users and the users' data,
rather than the old "service provider provides all the data, users
passively consume".
  * software customizability (software as a service).  The old model of
software as a static product that customers pay for is gone.
Software's constantly revised (eBay tweaks their web site on a near
weekly schedule), and you don't own the software you use it as a
service.

Not every interesting topic is covered by this theme, of course--we'll
still want other talks, without having to try and force them into this 
framework.  But ideally there should be a core of mod_perl talks that 
address this theme. For example:

  * case studies: how a site implemented some aspect of the architecture
of participation, how someone's using the commodity open source
software to build a new and interesting layer on top that wasn't
possible before, how a flexible tool made DIY-IT possible

  * tools: tools to revise web sites, tools to monitor web site
effectiveness, tools to implement recommendations, your system's
Rendezvous library and cool applications built on top of it,
distributed authentication/trust

We want to be able to point (in marketing and in keynotes) to a lot of
talks and say "look at how open source is making innovation possible,
look how it's leading this move to a new model of application
development".  Basically, it's about building up a coherent showcase of
technology and case studies so that attendees can take the ideas and
techniques in talks and tutorials and use them in their day-to-day
jobs.  "What did you learn at OSCON?"  "I know how to speed up our site
revisions, I have great ideas for how we can get our users to
contribute to our site, I found another open source product we can use
to get rid of a proprietary one and it will let us ...."

Presentations should be 45 or 90 minutes long (+panels), tutorials -- 3 or 
6 hours.

Proposals are due on Feb 13, so don't procrastine and submit your 
proposals now: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2005/create/e_sess

Just like Perrin did you are more than welcome to submit your ideas to the 
list first, and get some feedback from the others.

        -- 
        __________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman            JAm_pH ------> Just Another mod_perl Hacker
http://stason.org/     mod_perl Guide ---> http://perl.apache.org
mailto:stas@xxxxxx.xxx http://use.perl.org http://apacheweek.com
http://modperlbook.org http://apache.org   http://ticketmaster.com