Release Early, Release Often

As two observant people have observed, and reported, the ACCU 2017 call for session proposals is open, but there appeared to be no statement of how to submit a submission. In the past, submissions had been by email. This though caused a lot of work that should be replaceable by using better tooling, i.e. a website of some sort. Whilst there are many "off the shelf" conference management systems, and they have all the features needed to deal with submissions, none of them seemed to fit the constraints of lightweight, able to generate webpages for the ACCU website, and free. We therefore (maybe wrongly in later hindsight, but we are committed for now) wrote our own little Flask/SQLAlchemy/SQLite application. For various reasons, it is not entirely production ready, but the data model should not need any adjustment from now. After taking a poll amongst various people, the Conference Chair has decided to go with the "release early, release often" concept which is clearly about putting alpha grade software out into the field and then debugging it whilst in production. The Conference Chair is claiming this is beta software not alpha software, so call is a release candidate and get it out there. Momentarily after this post goes live the application will go live, so as to allow people to submit session proposals. If you find any glitches, errors, or just things you feel should be improved here is the place to submit issues. All the software is FOSS, so if you also submit pull requests, that would be even better. (Pull requests to make changes to posts already posted on the blog will, obviously, be ignored, for obvious reasons.)