(I'll leave them anonymous unless they wish to out themselves)
Q: will you go to that panel?
A: no - because panels are just excuses for consultants to advertise their next book and sell their next year's consultingIn the same way that half the technical programme (until this year at least) was quite predicable, half the panels have been predictable too.--JamesNoble
So how could we change that? Basically, we select from the list of panels that are submitted. This year we had only 10 submissions total. I had to go and coerce someone into submitting one of those 10 after the deadline because we hadn't received any submissions on that topic.
I don't know. I don't want to throw bricks and anyone in particular - I haven't looked at this year's Panel programme at all yet.
If submissions don't work, perhaps the committee or chairs need to be more proactive. That seems to be the commercial conference / JAOO model. Perhaps if OOPSLA wants to be a commercial conference drawing thousands of practitioners, it really has to think of itself primarily in that sense, and plan on inviting the people we'd really like to come!