OSDC 2008 Call for Papers

Call For Papers is now closed. All the authors of accepted proposals have been notified. Proposals not accepted in this round are still under consideration if an accepted author is unable to make a final submission.

We received over 100 quality submissions on open source development tools, languages and technologies, so thank you.

Key dates:

 Call for Papers   28 April, 2008 
 Call for Papers Closes   30 June, 2008 
 Proposal acceptance   21 July, 2008 
 Accepted paper submissions   15 September, 2008 
 OSDC 2008 Hackfest (Sponsored by Google)   2 December, 2008 
 OSDC 2008 Main Conference!   3-5 December, 2008 

If you have any questions, you can check our speaker faq or contact the OSDC 2008 program committee.

Instructions for Presenters

All presentations (except lightning talks) must be accompanied by presentation materials. A detailed paper complementing your talk matter would be preferred - your slides merely illustrate your verbal presentation.

Failure to submit a paper may result in speaker benefits being withdrawn.

Presentation formats

We will accept the following types of presentation:

Lightning Talks (5 minutes)

You don't need to submit a proposal for a lightning talk. These will be organised from sign-up sheets at the conference. Instructions will be given on the first day.

Lightning talks are brief talks that focus on a single example, idea, project or technique. Lightning talks are not expected to cover all aspects of the subject. They're an excellent forum for first-time speakers.

Standard (30 minutes)

This is the preferred format. 20 minutes for talking and 5 minutes for questions (with 5 minutes spare for set-up and take-down). This is enough time to cover a few issues well and allows us to provide a good selection of talks throughout the day.

Extended (60 minutes)

Extended talks are ideal for experienced speakers who want to cover a large topic. 45 minutes for talking and 10 minutes for questions (with 5 minutes spare for set-up and take-down).

If you choose the longer time slot please include include a justification in your proposal. We reserve the right to ask you to change a long talk proposal to be a standard length instead.

Tutorial

There will be a single day of tutorials on Tuesday TBA. Tutorial presenters will receive free registration to the conference and an additional remuneration to be determined. Tutorial materials will follow the same schedule as papers below.

Submission stages

1. Proposals

Your proposal will need to include:

Don't panic. We don't require you to have written the technology that you want to talk about. If you use something in your day to day working life and you think that other people might benefit from using it, then feel free to propose a talk on it.

The proposals from OSDC 2007 can be found at osdc2007.cgpublisher.com/proposals.

2. Proposals acceptance

Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their proposal by the proposal acceptance date. Obviously we'd love to accept as many proposals as we can, but we only have a certain number of sessions to fill.

If you require faster confirmation of acceptance (for example, because you are travelling from overseas and require extra time to make arrangements) please communicate this to the committee when submitting your proposal.

3. Paper Submission

All presenters are required to submit presentation materials by the specified date.  Failure to do so may result in loss of your speaking slot and speaker benefits.

This submission is to be your full paper, not a draft. It should contain all of the usual aspects of a paper such as an abstract, introduction, body and conclusion. Please ensure that this submission has had its grammar and spelling corrected and that code snippets work.

Your paper allows attendees who attended your talk a chance to refresh their memories about your presentation, and gives attendees who missed your talk a chance to learn from you anyway. Make sure your paper includes - at the very least - a brief introduction to your subject material and a list of further resources.

We would prefer that papers for standard length talks (30 minutes) be no more than 5 A4 pages of 11-point type with reasonable margins and papers for long talks (60 minutes) be no more than 10 pages. Appropriate file formats include any file that can be read with Open Office (which includes plain text and HTML with minimal mark-up). Slides (even those accompanied by speaker notes) will not be printed in the proceedings.

Papers from previous OSDC conferences provide a good range of sample paper layouts.

By submitting a paper to be published in the proceedings, you are agreeing to the OSDC Publication Agreement.

4. Review results

All papers will be reviewed. The purpose of review is to ensure that papers are of a high quality and to aid our talk scheduling. The purpose is not to identify spelling or grammatical errors or to test code snippets, although errors may be corrected during the review if found. Obviously, we'd strongly recommend you ask a friend or colleague to give your paper a read through before you submit it.

Once your paper has been reviewed, the review results will be provided to you so that you can make the requested improvements for the published version.

5. Proceedings version

This is the final copy of your paper as it will be printed in the conference proceedings.

Speaker Benefits

All OSDC speakers (except for lightning talks) at OSDC will have their conference registration fee waived.

Note that it's important that you get your papers in by the due dates - we reserve the right to withdraw the free registration if you don't get it in on time. If you're having problems meeting the deadlines, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can work with you to figure it out.

If you're a student, please make sure that we know it. We may offer prize(s) for the best student paper submitted.

Contact details

If you have any questions, please contact the OSDC 2008 program commitee.

Stream List

These are the streams defined in the proposal system.

Language Streams

Concept Streams