Call for Papers
Please note that paper proposals are now closed.
General Information
OSDC is being promoted and run by the Melbourne Perl Mongers group. Papers on all open source development tools and technologies are solicited for submission to OSDC 2004.
If you intend your presentation to be on an aspect of an open source development technology which isn't Perl, please ensure it is on the list found at http://www.osdc.com.au/papers/technology.html . This is to ensure that we will have expert reviewers to review your paper.
What if your technology is not on the list?
Whilst it's probable that someone in Melbourne Perl Mongers has at least a passing familiarity with your technology, we may not be experts. We're counting on getting assistance to run this conference and do these reviews by inviting other user groups to get involved. If you're in a user group for the technology that you want to present, try to get that user group to volunteer their assistance. Requirements on these user groups are listed at http://www.osdc.com.au/papers/get_involved.html . The cut off date for user groups getting involved is 5pm, June 28th 2004.
There is no user group...
If the technology that you wish to present on is a common tool, such as CVS or a database engine, we'll review these on a case by case basis. Send your proposal in as instructed below.
If the technology is another programming language or toolset, then contact us at consideration@osdc.com.au prior to 5pm, June 7th 2004. We may have to decline your proposal if we cannot find reviewers for it.
Key dates
Important dates are:
| Last date for registration of other technologies | 28th June 2004 |
| Proposals deadline | 28th June 2004 |
| Proposal acceptance | 29th July 2004 |
| Submission deadline | 13th September 2004 |
| Review results | 8th October 2004 |
| Proceedings version | 8th November 2004 |
| Conference | 1st - 3rd December 2004 |
Each of these stages is explained further below.
Topic categories
Topics should fall into one of these categories.
<Your technology> in Business
Success stories (and disaster stories with a happy ending) about using <your technology> in the office.
<Your technology> in Action
I needed to do < some task > and so I used module < library 1 > with < library 2 > and a new module I created to work miracles.
<Your technology> Aspects
Cool things about <your technology>. For example, in the Perl talks you might discuss idioms, Perl's internals (push vs unshift, how hashes work... ), Perl 6...
Please specify your category with your proposal.
Instructions to Authors
Presentation formats
We will accept the following types of presentation:
Lightning Talks ( 7 minutes )
These are brief (7 minute) 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 ( 20 minutes )
This is the preferred format. It allows 20 minutes for you talking, 5 minutes for questions and 5 minutes for people to move to the next room. This is enough time to cover many topics and keeps the day interesting.
Long ( 45 minutes )
Long talks are ideal for experienced speakers who want to cover a large topic. 45 minutes for talking, 10 minutes for answering questions.
Submission stages
Proposals
A three line description of your lightning talk is all that is required.
For longer talks please submit a short (< 500 word) description of what you'd like to talk about and which category it belongs in. This description should include:
- likely name of talk
- likely category of talk
- your qualifications with respect to this talk
- who your talk is likely to interest
- preferred length of your talk (pick from the types above)
- brief outline of what you expect to cover
- a URL for the project/software your talk covers (if applicable)
- which Open Source license your project/software has been or will be released under (if your talk is project based)
- whether you would like to have your paper refereed (if you don't know what this means, the answer is probably no).
For example, if you were Damian Conway wanting to talk about Perl 6 you might write:
| Title: | Perl 6 |
| Category: | Perl Aspects |
| Qualifications: | Helped design Perl 6, wrote the Exegeses |
| Interest: | Anyone who wants to know more about Perl 6 |
| Length: | Long - 45 minutes |
| Outline: | Perl 6 is going to be really cool and the sky isn't falling. Will cover the zip operator, junctions and a few other things. .... |
| URLs: | Visit http://dev.perl.org/perl6/exegesis/ to see my writings |
| License: | NA |
| Refereed: | No |
Conference organisers reserve the right to change the length assigned to a talk, if necessary. If we are not able to provide refereeing for your paper we will inform you of this when we accept your proposal.
Don't panic. We're not going to 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.
Please note that paper proposals are now closed.
Proposals acceptance
Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their proposal by the proposal acceptance date. If you require a faster confirmation of acceptance, such as if you'll be travelling from overseas and require extra time to make arrangements, then please communicate this to the committee when submitting your proposal.
Submission
This is your full paper, not a draft. This paper should contain all the usual things in 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.
If you are intending to have your paper refereed, please ensure that the paper you submit is anonymous. (Note that most papers will not be refereed, so don't be concerned if you are unsure about what this means.)
Submissions are limited to 5 A4 pages of 11-point type with reasonable margins excluding bibliography (if any) and appendices. Details on the submission process will become available on the OSDC website at http://www.osdc.com.au/papers/submission.html . The paper should be in one of the following formats: POD, ASCII, HTML, PDF or Postscript.
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.
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.
If your paper has been submitted to be refereed, the results of that refereeing will be submitted back to you at this stage.
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.
Contact details
If you have any questions, please contact the OSDC committee on osdc-help@osdc.com.au