ACCU Conference News

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.

A month and a half ago we said we would "release early, release often". Well we released early, but it has been a while since we released anything – so not exactly often. However, a release has come, in fact it happened an hour or so ago. The core of the change is that whilst this blog and other static pages are still static and managed with Nikola, we now have a Flask wrapper and driver for the material. We also have a single style across the static and dynamic pages. The blog will have entries added as and when. Other static pages will be added as appropriate. The dynamic stuff will be the submission of session proposals, and their review. This is the next thing to be put in place, along with more (and better) styling. So this is a website that is going to grow somewhat organically. If you find any problems or have any suggestions (preferably backed by pull requests!) please checkout the repositories for the Flask stuff and the Nikola stuff on GitHub.

In other news, the site is now always HTTPS. Whilst this is probably not necessary for the static material, it is will necessary for the session proposal submission sections. It seems easier not to switch back and forth between HTTP and HTTPS, so it is HTTPS always. Hopefully this meets with people’s approval.

Session proposal submission for ACCU 2017 will likely start in the middle of October and last for one month to the middle of November. The system of email used last year didn’t really work, was a lot of effort, and there are better ways of doing things. So we are busily creating a Web-based system for proposal management, and scheduling of accepted sessions. In the meantime we have this blog and static material, the styling of which will almost certainly change over the next few weeks.

If you are wondering what sort of sessions will happen at ACCU 2017, then the sessions at ACCU 2016 will give a flavour. Go take a look at the ACCU YouTube Channel. Obviously the actual material in ACCU 2017 will be a year on from that of ACCU 2016, but the videos will give you the idea of the sort of thing that goes on. Of course we are always open to new ideas, do not feel constrained by what you see there.

ACCU conference sessions are 90 mins or 15 mins – and we also have lightning talks of 5 mins. 90 mins sessions can be presentations, mini-workshops, panel sessions, anything with "meaty" content that attendees will be interested in. Presentations here doesn’t mean just talk. One of the reasons for the 90 min session is to get interaction and discussion. 45 min and 50 min sessions with maybe a minute for questions doesn’t work in really informing, it is the 50 mins of content and 40 mins of questions and debate that really works. Some people intermix so it is 90 mins of presentation, question , debate. The important thing is that 90 min sessions at ACCU conferences are interactive. 15 mins sessions are generally presentations, but these "quickies" allow people to get some ideas over without the need for a full 90 mins. Lightning talks are, well lightning.

Check out the videos on ACCU YouTube Channel Let us know what you think.

In previous years the ACCU Conference website was just a part of the ACCU website using the same content management system. This year we are branching out and creating a website for the conference that is separate from the main ACCU website. As many of you will know the ACCU website has moved and completed changed infrastructure, it is this revolution that has enabled separation of the technologies for the main website and the conference website.

The conference website will principally be a Flask/Python3/SQLAlchemy/SQLite3 system but with the blog and static pages being Nikola managed. Clearly this is an experiment. But we are going with "release early, release often" so we are putting the Nikola blog and static pages up now so as to get assistance designing and styling the pages and preparing the ground for the dynamic section which will handle session proposal submission, proposal review, accepted session scheduling and rendering of the programme, speakers, and session blurbs.

This website is almost certainly going to change style and structure as well as content on a fairly regular basis.

If anyone wants to get involved in helping bring this infrastructure to fruition in the few weeks we have, all help gratefully accepted, email conference@accu.org.