Dreamsongs Wiki

BusinessTrack

How about adding a separate track on the business perspecitves of modern and/or cool techniques? Topics may include things such as:

We had some of these topics touched in keynotes or workshops but the rest was mainly technical. Such a business track or executive track may have the same result in industry, the technical papers have in academia: Building credibility for the management and thus open a new market (BTW can you imagine a conference where managers send their people, because management thinks, it's cool to go there.... :-)

- JensColdewey

Yeah. I wonder if we could combine with the IntruigingTechnologies or whatever its called idea: new stuff from the business side, rather than the research side

(where research includes both them narrow academics and also those equally narrow people in the main corporate labs).
JamesKjx

I like the idea, but I'm not crazy about the name. It seems a similar idea that the UK people have in mind when they talk about

Software Practice Advancement as the wider topic of their OT

conferences ( http:/www.bcs-oops.org.ukot2004.html ).

HelenSharp mentioned this on the TypesOfPapers page.

But (unlike OT, as I understand it) I think we should still have submitted and refereed papers on practice advanacement: we should study what we do, and report on what happens when we try new things.

-- RobertBiddle

(Hi Robert :-). Yeah I was wondering how to mention that. For those who don't know BCS OOPS groups have renamed their OT conference to SPA. OT's slogan was something like "where experts come to learn"; but they always aimed to be a much smaller conference than OOPSLA, about 150 I think, all insiders anyway. OT was set up by BruceAnderson as the "good bits" of OOPSLA - interactive workshop-cum-tutorials I think and UK people rant about it the way the europeans rant about JAOO and EuroPloP. I talked to Allan O'Callaghan a little about this at Euro a week ago

JamesKjx

I like the idea of a businees track. This may attract more technical managers to attend. Every year a request for proposals for special tracks is issued by the conference chair as part of the CFP. I think such a business track could be an excellent proposal. Of course the final decision is up to the conference chair and his committee.
MamdouhIbrahim

I like this idea too. I remember some OOPSLA talks in the mid 1990's from managers about management issues in migrating to OO development.

To really follow through we should also consider keynotes or invited talks by appropriate well known speakers. The "pattern" for invited speakers has been, IMHO, "something old, something new, something borrowed", this would add, "something business".

(Aside: I had been thinking about trying to do something about an invited speaker of sorts for Practitioner Reports for this year, but couldn't come up with a concrete idea. Oh well.)

-- GailHarris