Saying "No" Nicely

EclipseCon Europe 2012 starts in about two weeks, and lots of attendees are figuring out which talks to add to their personal ECE schedules. There are lots of great talks, so it's not easy. But it's one of those "good problems" to have.

Another good problem the ECE program committee had back in July was deciding which talks to accept from among so many excellent submissions. Accepting talks is the most obvious task of a program committee. Declining talks -- carefully and thoughtfully -- is less obvious, but even more important.

Anyone who's had a talk declined knows it's disappointing, and that can't be avoided. But declining talks well can prevent a disappointed submitter from turning into a demoralized submitter who won't try again.

This year's ECE program committee left comments on every declined submission, explaining why it was not accepted. They answered a lot of follow-up questions to provide more detail. This task was considered essential, and the accept/decline emails didn't go out until all the comments were added.

The expectation -- and hope -- is that by declining talks well, we encourage new submitters to try again, and keep our EclipseCon content fresh and interesting.

EclipseCon Europe 2012: We need your help!

From October 23 to 25, 2012 the Eclipse Foundation will hold the 6 7th edition of our annual European Eclipse Conference.

EclipseCon Europe is all about community - learning, exploring, sharing and collaborating on the latest ideas and information about Eclipse. Contributors, adopters, extenders, service providers, consumer, business and research organizations alike, gather to share their expertise and learn from each other. 

Networking activities lead to synergies in the community, from giving and receiving help on specific technical issues to  generating new business opportunities. Sponsors of Eclipse Summit are an integral part of the entire event, participating in an exchange from all areas of their organizations from technical to management.

Last year we celebrated Eclipse's 10th anniversary together with more than 550 attendees at EclipseCon Europe.  This year the conference theme is open innovation: how enterprises, researchers and other organizations use Eclipse to develop innovative products and solutions. 

We are also co-hosting the European OSGi community event and are extending a special welcome to the International OSGi community. And, again  we are proud to have a solid technical program, but we won't just be networking and listening to technical talks. Let us surprise you with our evening program! Details will be published in the early part of October.

How can you help? Simply, spread the word. Please forward this blog post to your peers, colleagues and business partners. Invite them to join us for EclipseCon Europe 2012. Or simple put the attached JPEG to the announcement board in your hallway.

For more information, please visit the conference website http://www.eclipsecon.org or send me a quick email.

Thank you in advance!

Automotive Industry Working Group News

I wanted to take the opportunity and inform you about things going on in the Eclipse Auto-IWG. We had a face-2-face meeting in Stuttgart at ETAS GmbH. We have made a lot of progress with the work packages as you can see from the meeting minutes and the updates made on the wiki.

In addition, we were listing to presentations from Stefan Voget (Continental) about EATOP, a potential Eclipse project implementing EAST-ADL, a presentation from Bosch India on an OSEE for Automotive package that they have created and finally from Oscar Slotosch from Validas in Germany on tool qualification. All the presentations are already available or will be made available at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Auto_IWG#Documents.

I'm also very pleased to welcome Validas AG from Munich, Germany and The Virtual Vehicle Competence Center from Graz, Austria as new Solution Members to the Eclipse Foundation. They have expressed strong interest in participating in the AutoIWG, and we are very happy to have their industry know-how and experience on board.

Is Eclipse important to Automotive and is Automotive important in Eclipse? Looking at the program of the upcoming EclipseCon in Reston, Virginia, I note that Ford's "What's next guy, Mr. Prasad and Peter Semmelhack, founder of Bug Labs will talk in their keynote presentation about the App Development Platform of the future car.

And in the 'normal' program, I can also find quite a number of talks that are of interest to the automotive crowd.

And last but not least, we will have an 'automotive meeting' at EclipseCon. Please add yourself to this Doodle poll if you are interested in participating or presenting.

Ralph