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