ACCU Conference News

Updated 2016-11-19: The website problems have been fixed, so we are staying with Plan A – proposal submission via the website. The deadline for submissions is 2016-12-02 – see Call for Sessions for details of submitting a session proposal.

As anyone who has tried to submit a proposal for ACCU 2017 has discovered, there are some serious problems with the Flask application. Failure to acknowledge a submission is one, not being able to submit more than one is another. Plus a whole collection of the buttons do the wrong thing. Sadly, for various reasons, the people who were developing the website have not been able to contribute for a while. Clearly this is ending up in a minor crisis. I guess this being a volunteer software development with a deadline, serious problems were inevitable. The issue is avoiding a major crisis.

We are going to try and get the website working so as to put website submission back on track. Failing this we will have to revert to Plan B. Yes there is a Plan B, no worries there. The question is only when, if we have to call time on website submission, we call time on website submission.

In any event we are going to extend the submission deadline as the current one is unreasonable in the circumstances. We are trying to decide what is the fairest date to set. Current thinking is people should be given at least three weeks of reasonable submission time. Let’s see if we can fix the website…

PS If you know anyone who wants a speaker deal ACCU 2017 ticket, and can be a major contributor to fixing this Flask/Jinja2/SQLAlchemy point them to the GitHub repository and get them to start getting the pull requests that add tests and fix the bugs rolling in.

PPS There is the possibility of some budget to hire a person for a short time to work on this if they can show they are capable and able to fix the Flask application very quickly. Anyone in this category should contact the conference chair.

Update 2016-11-14T14:38+00:00, altered URLs and dates.

We invite you to propose a session for this leading software development conference.

We have a long tradition of high quality sessions covering many aspects of software development, from programming languages (e.g. C, C++, D, C#, Go, Rust, Clojure, Erlang, Groovy, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, ECMAScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, etc.), and technologies (libraries, frameworks, databases, etc.) to subjects about the wider development environment such as testing, architecture and design, development process, analysis, patterns, project management, and softer aspects such as team building, communication and leadership. See the 2016 schedule for examples.

Conference sessions are one of:

The conference also has lightning talks, which are 5 minutes in length. These presentations are organized on-the-fly at the conference. Please think about creating and presenting a lightning talk, but these do not need a submission as part of this call for sessions.

Proposals about specific products and technologies will only be considered if they are open source and available for free (at least for non-commercial use) and there is some non-trivial technical content to the session. If you are interested in presenting about a proprietary technology, there are "sponsored sessions" which are outside the standard conference schedule. Also being a conference exhibitor is a very good way of bringing products to the attention of attenders. Please, email conference@accu.org for more information.

Presenters of 90 and 180 minute sessions will be offered free conference attendance and financial assistance in the form of contribution to travel and accommodation costs. Presenters of pre-conference session that run will be offered a package of fee, accommodation and travel tailored on a case-by-case basis. (NB The conference organizers reserve the right to cancel a pre-conference session that is scheduled if insufficient people sign up for it.)

To propose a session please first Register on the website. You will then need to Login to the website. On successful login the menu will change to reveal the proposal submission and review entries: navigate to the Submit Proposal page and fill in the proposal form (NB navigating to this link before being logged in will likely result in a server error 500). In case that you want to do a shared presentation, please add the other Presenters/Co-Presenters. In a joint presenter situation, the person completing the proposal will be treated as the proposer and the person to whom conference presenter benefits will be offered.

The Abstract should contain a short description of about 250 words and the expected level of participants/audience: all, beginner, intermediate, expert. This text will be used on the website for those sessions accepted for the conference.

Each person should only put forward one or two proposals.

The Call for Sessions will close at Friday 2016-12-02T23:58+00:00.

Acceptance/rejection emails should be sent out by Friday 2017-01-13.

The full conference schedule should be announced Friday 2017-01-20.

The conference has always benefited from the strength of its programme. Please help us make 2017 another successful event.

Thank you!

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.)

One hopes, indeed often assumes, that there will never be any misconduct at a conference. Most conferences, and all the ACCU ones to date as far as we know, have had no problems. If there has been some small offence given, it has been handled between the parties to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. Nonetheless it is incumbent on conference organisers to have in place a process for handling situations that cannot be dealt with directly by the parties involved. To this end, ACCU 2017 has adopted an adaptation of the PyCon UK 2016 Code of Conduct, and processes for dealing with infractions. Many people sensitive to the issues have commented that this is a good Code of Conduct and process, so it seems better to adapt something seen as good rather than attempt to start from scratch.

There should be a link on every page on this site in the top right under the ACCU organisation logo that leads to the ACCU 2017 Code of Conduct. Such document should never be cast in stone, they should be allowed to evolve to become better and to stay relevant to the moment. If you find any errors or text you feel should be amended please contact the Conference Chair.

We hope the process outlined never has to be invoked, that everyone coming to ACCU 2017 speaks and behaves appropriately for the context. We hope the document just lies there in the background gathering dust, but it is there, just in case.

The dates of ACCUConf 2017 have been known for a while but we delayed announcing them formally for reasons which are unlikely to come to light – mostly because we have no idea what they were. However,

are the dates in my diary and the diary of the Archer Yates people who are organising the conference for ACCU. Obviously at this stage we have no idea what the conference content will be as we haven’t had the call for session proposals as yet. I have been waffling about "mid-October to mid-November" to various people, but it seems reasonable to be a bit more specific. We seem to be iterating on:

We are busy making a website entry form for submitting the proposals. We will be trying it out ourselves in the next few days to ensure it works. Members of the Programme Committee will review the proposals as they come in. A short while after the end of the call for proposals, the Programme Committee will meet, sift the sessions to put into the schedule and make the first cut at the schedule. This is not usually an easy process, so we are likely to leave notification until 2017-01-13. We will of course though inform as soon as we can, preferably well before that date.

So put the dates in your diaries, and prepare you proposals awaiting the opening of the call.