At 04:50 AM 11/14/00 -0800, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> >>>>> "Stas" == Stas Bekman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>Stas> P.S. For ApacheCon you just submit your proposals from one of the above
>Stas> links, no need to send proposals here for them to get accepted. Of
>course
>Stas> you are welcome to discuss... :)
>
>Since I've never been a "paper" speaker before, but only an invited
>speaker or paid tutorialist, would there be interest in me submitting
>something to the mix? And how complicated would it need to
>be... something like an updated version of my "Stonehenge::Pictures"
>tool from my WT columns? In fact, would a paper be the equivalent
>of a column, but presented live?
I can only speak for myself, but here's my take. Although I may piss off
some people/conference coordinators-- hopefully not.
1) I am sure there's always going to be an interest in you submitting
something to the mix. You're Randal Schwartz!
2) Different conferences have different audiences and different feels to them.
eg a lot of Usenix conferences are really formal. They always want a paper
plus eventual slides and they are usually quite academic. It's a lot of
work IMHO to submit to a Usenix conference. I am a bit disappointed that
PerlCon started taking this road (at least they made it really hard in the
1999 one) especially as PerlCon isn't Usenix.
Submitting formal papers is fine for academics, but in IMHO it's a waste of
time to have a speaker write a paper for most of the talks I've seen. And
usually the paper leaves things open that the speaker finally fills in the
blanks for at the conference -- so conference proceedings are 60% usually
sucky anyway -- even in paper format without forcing a formalism to the
suckiness. :)
On the other end of that you have something like the old LinuxExpo's in
North Carolina b4 RedHat made it big and quit the conference circuit. Those
talks were more informal and highly techie. Maybe YAPC is like that -- I
wish I could have attended a YAPC, they sound like a lot of fun.
Then you get the Web Design and Development or InternetWorld's of the
world... they're usually a lot of case studies and a bit more business
oriented. In fact, some of those more commercial conferences have even
started having the nerve to ask for money from the speakers to speak. By
the way, the ones I mentioned by name (WDD and IW) do NOT have this
practice as far as I know -- but I know others that do.
From seeing the survey of talks, It seems to me like ApacheCon is in the
middle. It's not precisely an academic conference so the paper submission
process doesn't seem so annoying as a Usenix but it does have a good share
of techie talks. I think the talks tend not to be too case study oriented
which can be a good thing.
I think case studies are great if there is a good technical technique (eg a
case study on a multilingual website), but they get real boring if it's
just someone saying the same thing. eg when we did a talk on Perl in
investment banking at PerlCon 99, we wanted to make sure we weren't
spouting the same thing about Perl being a cool, easy-to-use glue language.
But to also share cool techniques that other investment bank IT people
attending our talk were able to chat about with us afterwards -- we've
still kept in touch with some of them. The fact that we were able to
connect with and reach out to Perl folks at other investment banks having
given the talk was really something that made it worthwhile for us.
Unfortunately, many case studies about Perl in XYZ industry tend to say the
same old mantra over and over again about how Perl is a great "glue"
language or something else everyone has heard about 10 million times.
Saying the same old thing is boring without backing up with some
interesting technique.
I do think that beginner talks are vital to conferences like ApacheCon to
get new people into open source and loving it. And also paying for the
facilities for the tech side.
I also think that some small mix of talks should be given to new people
who've never talked before because it will get them interested in open
source and contributing more. To some degree, people who are witty and good
at talking but who aren't as deep techie-wise are actually great people to
give a talk teaching new people how to do stuff.
I am no judge of speaking, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I prefer
engineering related stuff. So although I am sure your pictures module may
be interesting. I would personally find your articles (and hence talking)
on things like your bandwidth throttling mechanisms and by extension using
mod_perl to manage spider attacks more interesting to me. But that's just
me -- as I said in a previous post, my tastes may be a bit out on the outer
techie edge.
Of course, I could also be misinterpreting what your pictures module does
-- and it might be more interesting to me than I am thinking. I obviously
can't speak for what others would think. But I definitely like the
throttling stuff. :)
Anyway, I suspect most conferences including ApacheCon would take slides.
And if a paper is submitted along with the slides, that's awesome. The
notes on the CFP page on the ApacheCon conference seem quite pragmatic.
They just want at least the notes that go with the slides so that a
non-attendee could get virtually the same information as attending the
talk. That doesn't mean you have to submit an entirely separate formal
paper (Usenix style).
In other words, I think they make it as easy as possible on the speakers
without sacrificing the attendees being able to get the jist of the talk if
they miss a talk because 2 interesting ones are scheduled at the same time.
Later,
Gunther
