Gathering expressions of interest

[Simon Stewart]

Later on today, I shall be putting up a page for expressions of
interest in speaking at SeConf 2.0. I think that we'll need this to
both be able to offer tickets, and to enable us to gauge interest in
the conference as a whole. Other than "Name", "Email", "Title",
"Abstract" is there anything that should go on this?

Simon

[Adam Goucher]

Has a date ish been chosen yet? I think that will determine a lot of
this. (I need to know by the 27th whether it will be March 26 - 29
before I respond to another conference thing.)

-adam

[Ashley Wilson]

I don't think a date has been chosen. Simon, did you throw out some
dates to the venues you looked at? Are we aiming for early April?

A page for speakers sounds good. Are you planning to post that to
Selenium HQ or should we also think about getting a website up for
seconf2012? If we wanted, I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to
clone the wordpress site we used for seconf2011.

--
Ashley Wilson
Customer Development Manager
Sauce Labs | 415.371.0060
You should follow us on Twitter

[Simon Stewart]

I'm traveling right now, so don't have the information right in front
of me, but it'll be in April, around the same time as this year.

Simon

[Bob Silverberg]

My apologies for the late response. I just returned from a week's
vacation on Sunday.

Do you have any idea of how many speaker proposals the conference is
likely to receive? For the conference I did last year we had 154
proposals from 69 speakers, and had 78 slots to fill. We used an
application to accept proposals from speakers, which the content
advisory board then used to rate and discuss the proposals. It worked
quite well, but could be overkill if you do not anticipate receiving a
large number of proposals (particularly not in proportion to the
number of slots).

In addition to the standard "Name", "Email", "Title" and "Abstract",
we also provided a place for "Notes to the Organizers", in which a
potential speaker could offer information that they thought would be
relevant to the selection committee, but shouldn't be included in the
public Abstract.

The same application was used to conduct a Topic Suggestion Survey,
which allowed members of the community to suggest and vote on topics
that they would like to see represented at the conference.

I'd be happy to discuss more about the application, as well as the
possibility of deploying it for SeConf if you are interested.

Cheers,
Bob

--
Bob Silverberg
www.silverwareconsulting.com

[Ashley Wilson]

Last year, we received 60 proposals for 18 Track A slots. When we
accepted proposals for the more informal Track B the week before the
conference, we received 12 proposals for 8 slots. I don't think we'll
have any trouble getting speaker. It worked well to have this form in
a google document so the speaker committee can easily review. And yes,
adding a "note to organizers" is a good idea! Last year, we also had
folks tell us about their prior speaking experience so we might want
to include that as well.

We should decide how many slots we'll have this year as well as the
length of the talks. Last year we did 30-min & 45-min talks. We could
repeat that or pick one. If we go with 30-minute slots in two tracks
over 2 days, that's 36-40 speakers excluding the keynotes and
depending on the break schedule. If we do 45-min talks, that's more
like 30 speakers.

Also, should we set up a form for people to submit workshop
presentations? I think we should put workshops after the conference,
limit the number of attendees, and possibly charge extra for that day.

+1 for a Topic Suggestion Survey!

--

[Bret Pettichord]

I would like to host a Watir track or something of the sort.

We are open-sourcing the testing framework that we've developed over the past several years at Convio and I am looking for a good conference where we could show it off. Maybe at the Selenium Conference?

Bret

--
Bret Pettichord
Director, Watir Project, www.watir.com

Blog, www.testingwithvision.com
Twitter, www.twitter.com/bpettichord

[Željko Filipin]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 2:55 AM, Bret Pettichord <br...@pettichord.com> wrote:
> We are open-sourcing the testing framework that we've developed over the past several years at Convio and I am looking for a good conference where we could show it off. Maybe at the Selenium Conference?

I would like to see that talk.

Željko
--
watir.com - community manager
watir.com/book - author
watirpodcast.com - host

[Simon Stewart]

The venue we've been looking at has a main room and a smaller breakout
room. I imagine we'll end up doing something like we did last year,
with the main programme organised and the break out room being used in
an "unconference" style.

I'd rather avoid having tracks dedicated to a specific API, but we can
certainly accept watir talks into the main event.

Simon

[Alister Scott]

Or we can just organize a "watir day" the day before or after the conference, the same as we did this year in SF.

[Simon Stewart]

I'm preparing a doc for the call for papers now and will mail it to
the workhorse committee. We'll push it live ASAP

Simon

[Simon Stewart]

The date will be the 16-18 April, 2012.

Simon

[Ashley Wilson]

awesome! adam christian is going to back up the 2011 website. as soon
as that's done, i'll send out login credentials so we can start
getting the 2012 info out there.

--

[Željko Filipin]

I have submitted a workshop proposal a week ago, but I did not get any reply. I would like to know if my workshop will be accepted, so I could maybe suggest another talk, or buy early bird ticked, while they are still avaialible (until Dec 31, 2011).

I have noticed that speakers page says "Call for speakers closes December 31, 2011. We’ll notify speakers shortly after". So, I will know if my workshop/talk is accepted _after_ early bird tickets are gone. (I work for a small company and my traveling budget is really limited.)

Should I just submit a few more talk ideas and hope one of them will be accepted?

Željko

[Ashley Wilson]

Valid point. We've just extended the early bird tickets to mid-January. We may push that back to the end of January, depending on if we extend the call for speakers. Either way, we'll be sure to make sure that all speaker applicants will be notified of their status before we close the early bird registration.

Best,
Ashley

[Željko Filipin]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Ashley Wilson <ash...@saucelabs.com> wrote:
> We've just extended the early bird tickets to mid-January. We may push that back to the end of January, depending on if we extend the call for speakers. 

Thanks.

Željko