Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Modeling: Too Much of a Good Thing

With the EclipseCon Program Committee meeting scheduled for 10:00AM this morning, I finally had to grab the bull by the horns.


That is, I needed to review all the EclipseCon 2009 modeling submissions before the meeting. There are 11 tutorial proposals, but only 2 slots as well as 20 long talks, but only 4 slots; I'm in the awkward position of having to consider my own stupid modeling talk among the candidates. Assuming we divide our 4 hours of short talks so half the time are 30 minute slots and the other half are 10 minutes slots, we have 20 30 minutes talks but only 4 slots and 8 10 minute talks for 10 slots. We clearly have enough excellent material to fill a whole track for a whole week. I know it's been said that too much of a good thing can be wonderful, but it seems that a great many people are going to be very disappointed. Oh well, it's a bridge we're going to have to cross, like it or not.


Of course my first approach will be to whine for more slots, but whining will only get you so far, even though I'm very good at it! Few can snivel as well as me and I'll have Rich Gronback to help me. Personally I think it's time for an Eclipse Modeling Summit; Hawaii would be nice. Assuming that whining will get us only so far and that Eclipse Modeling Summit won't happen any time soon, I'm left wondering how best to make decisions. For example, will attendees want an EMF and a GMF tutorial, or will they want different cool things that haven't been offered before? If you have opinions, please feel free to spout them.


No matter what, rejecting proposals won't make any new friends I'm sure, so it's good that at Eclipse I can buy frienship. Apparently friendship requires long term maintenance though. I was the 2nd donor as well as the 400th. I really like the high speed download mirror.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ed,

regarding finding out what kind of talks / tutorials attendees are looking for, why not set up a poll, e.g. at doodle? Here is an example: http://www.doodle.com/participation.html?pollId=bpva9kg4tykqdhcr . If you want to reuse that, let me know, I'll send you the admin link.

Peter

Ian Skerrett said...

Why not organize an Eclipse Modeling Summit? It really isn't that hard and I would be happy to help. Of course not at the same time as EclipseCon.

Anonymous said...

Well, at least I can feel better for not submitting a talk on the TextUML Toolkit or executable UML. It probably wouldn't make it anyway...

Ed Merks said...

It's a good idea Peter, although the submissions system already allows people to comment on each submission. Of course it wouldn't be all that hard for someone to get all their friends to lobby for their submission, so even such comments or votes in a poll would need to be taken with a grain of salt...