Dreamsongs Wiki

WhatsNotBroken

What are the keepers as ploppies would say - the bits of OOPSLA that do work and that we don't want to lose. (see also WorthKeeping)

JamesKjx

Workshops - I don't think the workshops system is broken. I think the workshops are a crucial incubator for many of the next big things...
JamesNoble

While not "broken", workshops could certainly be improved. In particular,

most workshops don't seem to leave any concrete results. Too many of

them are paper presentation sessions. We need to do a better job of coaching

the people who run them. -RalphJohnson

Agree with James about workshops - essentially the only reason I've ever gone. To Ralph: suggest some pointed questions to be answered by the submission, like

What would wild success in this workshop look like?
How would wild success change the practice? the research?
How will you make it more likely that people come prepared?

Also it would be good to have writeups of successful workshops to use as exemplars - BrianMarick

OK how about:

DesignPatterns - writeup of an oopsla workshop.
...

JamesNoble (?)

TechnicalProgram academic status
Even if OOPSLA is only the third most prestigious ACM SIGPLAN conference, it's still pretty prestigious. We should think carefully before risking this. This is why everone who gets rejected from OOPSLA is so bitter about it.
JamesNoble

First of all, I don't think OOPSLA is broken to the point some are claiming. Granted the attendance has dropped from past years, but OOPSLA is not alone ... just compare it to other conferences during the same period of time (last three years). Until the economy is back to what it was we will not have a clear picture as to how bad (or good) OOPSLA is.

Of course there is always room for improvement, and that is the purpose of this forum, right? So, here are some thoughts that span many of the already discussed issues:

Federated Conferences: Not sure how Federated Conferences are different than separate tracks each with its own committee, presentations, and acceptance rules, which OOPLSA has been promoting for several years. Trying to federate already well established conferences under one umbrella might prove to be an organizational nightmare, and it is not clear how many new attendees such federated conferences will attract more than the sum of those who already attend these separate conferences. Also, it is not clear if attendees of one conference will find time to attend other conferences� events particularly if all conferences were held on the same days. Just imaging the complaints we currently receive about the different events scheduled on Sunday and Monday. In any case, OOPSLA 2004 is experimenting with the collocation of two other conferences and it will be interesting to analyze the results. I still agree with Dick in his summary that OOPSLA is already federated.
Workshops: Don�t mess with OOPSLA workshops. Don�t charge for them, and don�t expect all to be a great success. As a matter of fact, I believe the more workshops the better, even if some are nothing but mini conferences. If every year we have only one workshop (out of 20+) producing some valuable conclusions, that by itself is a great success story for OOPSLA.
Specific products how to. It was mentioned in this forum that many of the practitioners would attend conferences where they can learn how to do something. Maybe having a series of in depth working sessions for specific products (call it tutorials or hands on, or whatever attracts their attention) could attract more industry practitioners.
Gathering of the leaders in the community. In the past, OOPSLA was the place where all the big names in the industry and those associated with the technology to be part of the conference in one form or another. It will be nice if we can approach those leaders and offer them opportunities to promote their hot topics as part of the conference. It will be a win-win situation since they want to promote what they are working on, and participants will want to come to hear and see what these leaders are working on.
Technical Papers. The best thing about OOPSLA is that it is one of the very few conferences which cater for both academia and industry. If OOPSLA is to continue as a recognized academic conference, then we should maintain the conventional forum that caters for those who must either publish or perish. We shouldn�t mess around with the way academia is expecting their work to be judged and recognized.
Applications. It has been said before in this forum� we have ignored the applications side of the conference and we need to pay more attention to what people have been using this technology for. Maybe it is time to re-examine the practitioner reports and find out how to attract interesting practical applications of the technology. Maybe we should make the applications one of the federated conferences (make the track official conference in its own right).
Expand Onward! To pursue next generation computing paradigms. Eventually we may see Onward! As a conference on its own, and could be one of the collocated conferences.
Better advertisement. Even companies with known products spend a large sum on advertising their products. The more people hear and learn about OOPSLA the more the conference attracts new attendees (assuming that the conference content is good and that its success is measured by how many people attend).
Finally, Stop talking about OOPSLA as if it is dead already. Who would want to attend a conference where those closely associated with it have already declared it dead? I believe the conference health is proportional to the energy spent by the committee on promoting the conference.

Sorry for the long posting

MamdouhIbrahim

I liked what Mamdouh said!

-- BrentHailpern

I disagree with the OOPSLA insider claim that "OOPSLA attendance is dropping, just look at attendance across all conferences". Of the conferences I've been going to for the past three years, OOPSLA is the only one with declining attendance. Other conferences, even during the tech recession, have been growing: ADC, EclipseCon, O'Reilly Open Source, MySQL, etc. So don't say "it's ok that we're down because everyone is down". All the ACM conferences might be, but perhaps that says something about the ACM format, eh?

--BjornFreemanBenson

Me too. Especially the ideas of

expanding Onward! in situ
doing an explicit applications (IntruigingTechnologies) stream
and BetterAdvertising. Even comparing with OOPSLAvsCHIvsGRAPH, I can't believe how cheap our website and brochures look. I know people have spent lots of effort doing them with XML and whatnot - this is the OOPSLA geekly approach - but there are lots of things done that look more exciting where everyone uses Word...
This also preserves value for those of us who have shares^H^H^H^H^Hpublications in OOPSLA we've spent years justifying to tenure committees. More importantly it means that we can keep encouraging our students to go - breeding the next generation of OOPSLA regulars :-) JamesKjx

Ralph points out that workshops often produce little in the way of results, and (other than for the attendees) I agree. In fact, that might be the point of workshops as they stand now: a few people self-select, get together, chat and organize each other, then separate.

It's probably not unfair to accept workshops on the condition that they'll publish some kind of result. We'd have to have an easy way to do that, probably some kind of wiki or something.

Often one can only attend one workshop, when there are a couple that seem tantalizing. How can we create WorkshopsWithResults? --RonJeffries

Ron asked the question: How can we create WorkshopsWithResults?

I think that the answer lies in how results are communicated. If I remember ("back in the old days") - the Conference Companion was published AFTER OOPSLA and included write-ups for workshops and other OOPSLA events.

Requiring a post-workshop write-up for inclusion on a Wiki is a great idea with low overhead costs.

--StevenFraser

Another thing about workshops: I think lots of industry people

miss out. Because they typically require a submission like

a position paper, and because attendance is all worked out in advance individually by each workshop, I think many outsiders people just don't get involved. Sometimes one sees these people wandering between workshop rooms on the first day, unsure whether they are welcome. For many (most?) workshops, they're not. Yet it is possible to run other kinds of workshops, like the P2P sessions at ADC. These are an excellent way to bring outsiders in:

they have more status than BOFS (you can see the schedule in advance) but they do allow anyone to turn up (unlike workshops)

and they're not just someone reading powerpoint at you (like all too many tutorials).

--RobertBiddle

For this year, workshops are expected to produce a poster for dissemination to others at the conference, to be displayed during the normal poster sessions. Workshop organisers had to submit a poster proposal. They are also told to have webpages for dissemination before and after the workshop (but I don't know whether this has ever been 'policed').

I agree with the ADC suggestion though (see my comment under TypesOfPapers). One of the inspirations for the P2P sessions at ADC (or Technical Exchange as they were called in 2003) was the OT series of conferences.

I tried to encourage people to put in different types of workshops this year, but the culture and habit of having 'traditional' workshops is very diffcult to 'break'. I'm not sure of an easy way to do this. Workshops don't have to have position papers, and at least two workshop organisers this year won't have them.

--HelenSharp

Thanks Mamdouh for defending the workshops without pay. Wish you had been around last year. The fuzz about paying and not paying... did not benefit last year.

Helen, I know your effort to change the format. And the 'mini-session' image is not very accurate. Last year more more than half of the workshops were run -- at least for part of the day -- in non-traditional format.

How about organizing a workshop -- open to everybody about organizing workshops, different formats, experiential learning. Would be happy to help -- that is if I can make it to this year's OOPSLA (budget and visa)

Martine

Something that I used to like was the exhibition area, or at least so it seemed to me. I really liked looking at the displays and talking to the people there, looking at new books, playing with new software tools, talking to other people doing the same. Sometimes it seemed easier to have conversations with total strangers who just happened to be interested in the same booksoftwareservice. It is true that I don't myself actually buy much stuff, but the world works in complicated ways, and I do end up talking to people about things I saw, and they do buy things. So anyway, I miss it. In 2003 the book room was a dim reminder of what the exhibition area used to be. --RobertBiddle

I have organized a bunch of non-slide workshops in the past OOPSLAs and I found that the most successful workshops - at least from the view of the participants - were those at which noone was chasing the group to produce "some results". Talking about an interesting topic with interesting people for a day gives much more value than pressing a group to produce something. This is the reason why we decided not to propose a poster last year and why I'm not too happy with the new policy. Great ideas from workshops will make it into the public one or the other way anyhow (the GOF book is only the prominent example)

JensColdewey