Dreamsongs Wiki

rpgIdeas

rpg thinks we can and should implement the ideas marked with rpg!.

(
rpg!
, but in a subtle way) Make OOPSLA (and SigPSLA) about programming in an unabashed way. That is, turn it into PSLA, which is its core meaning.
Add a focus every other year to bring together all the programming language interest groups to explore commonalities and differences.
(
rpg!
) Make a venue for leaders of programming to come together so that OOPSLA is a gathering of the elders. Maybe make a venue for allowing leaders to talk about or explore their new hot passions.
Attract trendsetters as the goal of a lot of the other ideas here.
Have a paper session where papers are discussed not presented, or have someone else present the paper.
Use a market-related mechanism to choose papers.
Take more papers and maybe publish only some in a journal.
(
rpg!
) Add some sort of short talk sessions: lightning talk, soapbox, remarks, rants.
(
rpg!
) Use smaller rooms for the academic papers so as to put them a little more in the background.
(
rpg!
Wikis and Blogs for sure) Make the conference more virtual: add live wikis/blogs, webcasts, etc.
Make 2005 the last OOPSLA - invite the authors of the great papers, do retrospectives, publish a book.
(
rpg!
) Find a way for invited speakers to interact more with the attendees.
(
rpg!
) Be more active soliciting panel topics and participants to make it less predictable.
(
rpg!
) Get more material on applications and practitioners' reports. Shepherd such people. Give them longer time (an hour to present and 30 minutes for questions etc).
Work on the entire experience: amenties, ambience, non-intellectual events, locale.
(
rpg!
) Make the conference either a little cross-disciplinary or very multi-disciplinary.
Think of creative pricing models: Priceline, specials, multi-person discounts for companies.
(
rpg!
) Add a session for experts to interact with the attendees on their problems.
(
rpg!
) Make it more attractive to attend tutorials, perhaps through pricing (increasing the fees but including a tutorial or by having academic and industrial pricing). Make them seem less remedial in nature.
(
rpg!
) Actively look for new topics, like small languages, ubiquitous computing, environments, building ontologies for specific domains, etc.
Think of a new mission for the next 10 years: MDA, ontologically oriented computing, programming plain and simple.
Make the conference more like JAOO (invited presentations, training-like or experince-sharing-like ambience, specific product how-to sessions.
(
rpg!
) Change the call to be less specific about topics and to encourage lessons from practice more.
(
rpg!
) Add open space sessions.
Change how the program committee works:
- (rpg!) Break it into focus groups (gc, types, etc)
- (rpg!) Make the champion write a sentence about what the contribution is
- Don't take 1-year increments of work
- Reduce the percentage of programming language papers
- Give each person a whiteball
- (rpg!) Don't reject automatically because of a flaw or allow 2 people to overrule a flaw
- (rpg!) Add shepherding or paper-writing mentoring
- Make more reviewers read each paper
- (rpg!) Back off of consensus
- Have some way for outside reviewers to "apply to review" papers
- Require controversial papers to be discusssed by reviewers before the meeting
- (rpg!) Accept more types of papers such as exploratory work and retrospectives, essays, big-idea papers, etc
- Accept some tier of the rejected (near miss) papers for shorter presentations (Salon des Refuses)
- (rpg!, but make this an initial sorting of the papers and have discussions too) Buy papers with minutes (but see BuyPapersWithMinutes for Steele's comments)
- (rpg!) Make the program committee more cool or somehow get them to accept reflective or speculative papers - or find a venue for such things
Make the entire conference more participatory, like OT.
(
rpg!
) Add a session for "whacky ideas," (like the ASPLOS WACI session) or Intriguing Technologies.
Add a track for business perspectives.
Add a track for programming environemnts, a track for scripting languages, a track for wikis.
(
rpg!
, but not in a big way) Make a federated conference. Embrace AI or other communities that do programming but don't have an outlet for that per se.
(
rpg!
, but not in a big way) Make a federated conference where a group of thought leaders is asked to make a mini-conference at OOPSLA. Or make OOPSLA a subconference within PSLA or something like that.
(
rpg!
) Add a Workshop Insights session and make workshop results more visible. Maybe with posters (as is being tried this year) or with wikis or something. Workshops seem to be working, so take advantage of this by amping them up even more.
Add a socialization area, which is what the exhibition area provided.
Add a customer track for users of our technology to have their say.
Give scholarships for educators.
(
rpg!
) Be more conscious of having outsidecontroversial keynotes along with insidestate of the art ones.

This might seem like a lot of changes, but partitioning them into "attitudinal" and "organizational" helps:

Attitudinal

(
rpg!
, but in a subtle way) Make OOPSLA (and SigPSLA) about programming in an unabashed way. That is, turn it into PSLA, which is its core meaning.
(
rpg!
) Make a venue for leaders of programming to come together so that OOPSLA is a gathering of the elders. Maybe make a venue for allowing leaders to talk about or explore their new hot passions.
(
rpg!
) Be more active soliciting panel topics and participants to make it less predictable.
(
rpg!
) Get more material on applications and practitioners' reports. Shepherd such people. Give them longer time (an hour to present and 30 minutes for questions etc).
(
rpg!
) Make the conference either a little cross-disciplinary or very multi-disciplinary.
(
rpg!
) Make it more attractive to attend tutorials, perhaps through pricing (increasing the fees but including a tutorial or by having academic and industrial pricing). Make them seem less remedial in nature.
(
rpg!
) Actively look for new topics, like small languages, ubiquitous computing, environments, building ontologies for specific domains, etc.
(
rpg!
) Add open space sessions.
Change how the program committee works:
- (rpg!) Break it into focus groups (gc, types, etc)
- (rpg!) Make the champion write a sentence about what the contribution is
- (rpg!) Don't reject automatically because of a flaw or allow 2 people to overrule a flaw
- (rpg!) Add shepherding or paper-writing mentoring
- (rpg!) Back off of consensus
- (rpg!) Accept more types of papers such as exploratory work and retrospectives, essays, big-idea papers, etc
- (rpg!, but make this an initial sorting of the papers and have discussions too) Buy papers with minutes (but see BuyPapersWithMinutes for Steele's comments)
- (rpg!) Make the program committee more cool or somehow get them to accept reflective or speculative papers - or find a venue for such things
(
rpg!
) Be more conscious of having outsidecontroversial keynotes along with insidestate of the art ones.

Organizational

(
rpg!
) Add some sort of short talk sessions: lightning talk, soapbox, remarks, rants.
(
rpg!
) Use smaller rooms for the academic papers so as to put them a little more in the background.
(
rpg!
Wikis and Blogs for sure) Make the conference more virtual: add live wikis/blogs, webcasts, etc.
(
rpg!
) Find a way for invited speakers to interact more with the attendees.
(
rpg!
) Add a session for experts to interact with the attendees on their problems.
(
rpg!
) Change the call to be less specific about topics and to encourage lessons from practice more.
(
rpg!
, but not in a big way) Make a federated conference. Embrace AI or other communities that do programming but don't have an outlet for that per se.
(
rpg!
, but not in a big way) Make a federated conference where a group of thought leaders is asked to make a mini-conference at OOPSLA. Or make OOPSLA a subconference within PSLA or something like that.
(
rpg!
) Add a session for "whacky ideas," (like the ASPLOS WACI session) or Intriguing Technologies.
(
rpg!
) Add a Workshop Insights session and make workshop results more visible. Maybe with posters (as is being tried this year) or with wikis or something. Workshops seem to be working, so take advantage of this by amping them up even more.