Two More Weeks To EclipseCon Europe 2013

Yes, we've only a few days left before meeting again in Ludwigsburg.

All preparation work has been done, and for the Eclipse Foundation team we can just wait how it goes after working for 8 long months on preparing the conference. But believe me, we have prepared well.

The registration numbers look good. I'm pretty confident that we will reach the numbers, which would then be another growth compared to last year's ECE. Some of the Tuesday tutorials are getting the recognition that they deserve, some are even fully booked. If you have not chosen your tutorial yet, you better hurry!

The mix of talks that the program committee together with the folks from the OSGi PC have chosen is again very high quality, the keynotes sound exceptional and the side events are pretty outstanding! It was very educational to watch Christian Campo and his program committee interact with the keynote speakers and the people submitting talks. While they still had to reject many of them, they made sure that everybody got a good explanation why it happened and what can be improved in the future.

In the fun department we are able to bring back the Circus and the Band to EclipseCon Europe. A big thank you to the sponsors SAP and BSI AG for making this possible. Apropos sponsors: While we received a couple of downgrades and late cancelations from sponsors/exhibitors, we were able to reach our goals and thus guarantee good food, coffee and some free alcoholic beverages for the evening events.

And some random notes from me:

I'm really proud about the improvements that we have made to EclipseCon Europe website. I think it's a lot more informative than it used to be, we have added a whole bunch of information and we will do so next year as well. Special thanks go to our designer Markus from Munich: I would even reference his website here if he had one :)

As an experiment for 2013, we have offered special slots during the days to certain 'interest groups'.  It will be like the good old poster sessions, mixed in for a couple of hours during the day. As I write, we'll have reps from Long Term Support (LTS) working group, folks that want to speak about scientific components and people presenting projects that have been created just recently or are in proposal state!

If you are interested what is going on in our Working Groups make sure that you attend the face-to-face meetings that are taking place on Monday, October 28 in the Forum as well. Meetings include the Automotive Working Group, Polarsys and the M2M Working Group.

With that, I finish. I have to go and check with our real-time registration system what the news of the last 15 minutes are.

Ralph

While we are waiting

Just a few days ago the we were closing the submission system for EclipseCon Europe 2013. We got well over 240 submissions, and now the program committee under its fearless leader Christian Campo is at work, sorting out which talks will make the program. I don't envy the team for this job. They are the ones that will have to send rejection letters to a large number of people that have taken time and energy to submit their talk.

But we should know in a couple of days!

But what to do until then? I thought I'd point out some other things about ECE that we already know :-)

First of all, we have worked on the website quite a lot. I personally like the new look, it reminds me of some time back that I have fond memories of ... And we have added a few new pages as well. For the people that land on our page by accident (for example after a google search for 'cool conference europe eclipse' we are now giving them some background, explaining that we have noting to do with some teenie movies. We also provide you some information for you boss: You can actually copy and paste the "Why should you go" paragraph from this section.

You might not really want to show him the Fun page. Because it shows that we have the circus coming again, and we have the band playing again as well. He might want to go instead of you.

So the motto for 2013 shall be: Come to ECE. If you bring your boss, you get 10% discount on both tickets :-)

The Sad Song

It's happening again. The acceptance emails for EclipseCon France went out. That is good news, and I can see that we'll have a lot of fun in Toulouse. The boys in the program committee have made good choices and put together a fine list of talks that we will listen to in June.

The really sad part is to see the link just next to it, the talks that were not accepted. I just went through this list and noticed that there are so many where I actually encouraged the folks to write it up and submit it.

For example, I remember that I visited the good people at Fortiss in Munich. I visited their labs earlier this year and was (and still am) excited about all the things that they develop with Eclipse. And they were excited when we talked about Toulouse. One of the talks made it into the program.

The other one (actually about one of my favorite subjects) got rejected. Alois, I look forward to meeting you in Toulouse. Dagmar, I hope that you come to Toulouse nevertheless. It would be great.

But here is an idea. All you organizers of demo camps should carefully study the list of rejected talks. They are about great topics (just look at this talk here you demo campers in northern Germany), and I believe the rejected list is a gold mine for you! And rejected people, don't feel bad. I want you to submit to the demo camps and yes, well, EclipseCon Europe is not to far away.

The happy song goes like this: We will do great in Toulouse. And we will have more space in 2014. And we will have a bigger program. And we will have more submissions ...

Darn, I see another sad song coming my way.

One last thing: Can I ask all you speakers for a little favor. Please change your Facebook and Twitter picture and your Gravatar logo for a couple of days to the speaker logo and help us to promote the conference.