On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 05:44:23PM +0000, Andrew Findlay wrote:
Here is the first draft of the call for papers.
Please read through and make suggestions. In particular, what do you think about the timetable for submissions?
A few thoughts/comments from my experiences with organising previous conferences.
* Setting a reasonably early deadline for submissions is a good idea. Once you have a few talks that you're happy to accept you can use them to publicise the event and get further speakers. This gets the ball rolling. For FLOSSUK we also always expect a few late submissions, it's best to be pragmatic and just accept that people are busy.
* If you have some regular attendees who are definitely going to give talks then get at least a title from them as soon as possible. Again, you can use this for publicity to get things going.
* Unless you know that someone is definitely coming, no matter what, don't accept more than a couple of talks from them. Their sudden absence due to illness or whatever would give you a big hole in the programme.
* Lightning talk sessions can be very good. They are a particularly good fit for the last session of the day when everyone is a bit weary. They are also a good way to encourage new people to get involved with giving talks when they might not like the idea of doing a longer talk if they're not accustomed to public speaking.
* It would be good to get all the basic information onto the website for the call of papers. Potential speakers will want to know the venue location, etc., I'm happy to help provide all the local information if you can give me write access to the website.
Stephen