ACCU Conference News

We published the ACCU 2020 schedule just some days ago. There is the usual disclaimer that the schedule is subject to change without notice till the end of the conference. This is intended to mean just amendments to the sessions, quickies, side events, or social events, as the keynotes are normally fixed points.

This year we have such an unusual situation, again. Which means we need to swap two of the keynotes this year too: Kevlins’s Saturday closing keynote has become Thursday’s opening keynote; and Sean’s Thursday opening keynote has become Saturday’s closing keynote. Given that constraints sometimes change - what never happens in real life software projects as we all know, - this was unfortunately The Right Thing To Do™ even though it is a change to the keynotes post publication of the schedule.

The conference programme committee is proud to announce the ACCU 2020 Schedule for the upcoming ACCU 2020 conference. We think it is a strong programme. We are happy that some speakers from years back have returned, last year speakers proposed again and that there are new speakers as well.

We have decided to move from our home grown conference application to Firebird’s conferencing application. This system has successfully been used by our organizer Archer Yates Ltd. for other events.

So the actual schedule is currently been published on Firebird’s system. Later we will mirror it to https://conference.accu.org.

This year we have all pieces in place. But as soon as something changes we will update the page.

People have already started registering for the pre-conference workshops and the conference itself – registering early is always good, especially for the pre-conference workshops.

ACCU conferences tend to have themes. Not for the content of the sessions of the conference, obviously. The conference themes are for the more social aspect of the conference. In particular, the conference dinner/supper (choose your preferred label here) on the Friday evening, and the t-shirts, and other bits and bobs.

For reasons that are likely to become very apparent at 2020-03-27T20:30 in the Bristol Suite. As is traditional we are having a competition to allow people to design the conference t-shirt based on the chosen theme.

So if you fancy having a go at designing the ACCU 2020 t-shirt on the theme of "medieval times" send your mock up images to ACCUConf Chair by 2019-02-10T12:00+00:00. We are sure there is a prize, but we are not entirely sure what that is just at the minute^[1].

The Call for Proposals for ACCU 2020 is now closed. We seem to have a lot of very good proposals. It is now for the Programme Committee members to review the proposals, and then select the ones to add to the schedule – which is likely to be quite hard given the seemingly high quality of the proposals.

Thank you to everyone who made a (or in some cases more than one) proposal(s).

More news as soon as the committee is in a position to make things public.

Although ACCU Autumn 2019 has not yet happened (register here), we must look forward to ACCU 2020 (to be held 2020-03-25 to 2020-03-28, with pre-conference workshops 2020-03-24, at Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre). In particular, it is time to open the ACCU 2020 Call for Proposals (CfP).

If you are new to submitting sessions for ACCU conferences, you may want to read the ACCU 2020 section on https://conference.accu.org/. It explains the types of session that can be submitted. It also has links to all the details about presenter deals.

Big change to the CfP this year: instead of using our own, homegrown Web application to collect and review proposals, we are using the Archer Yates Associates (AYA – the people who do all the ACCU conference organising) instance of Firebird – a system for managing conferences.

So in order to submit a proposal you will need to go to:

https://flame.firebird.systems/archer-yates/ACCU2020/MySubmissions

Unless you are already logged in, this takes you to the sign-up/login page. You will need to sign up first so that you can then login and start submitting proposals.

We believe the sequenced multi-page user interface for submitting proposal details is easy to use, and is easier/better than the old homegrown single page entry system.

As in past years the presenter biography entries and the proposal summary blurb are AsciiDoc fragments – sadly at the time we open the CfP, the AsciiDoc fragment editor is not quite in place so you have to enter AsciiDoc using a plain text editor. It is hoped that the AsciiDoc editor will be in place next week. Not everyone chooses to use AsciiDoc, some people just enter plain text – entering plain text using the AsciiDoc fragment editor is fine.

NB The AsciiDoc fragments will be manipulated to appear within the source of the webpages on https://conference.accu.org, see for example ACCU 2019 Sessions. It is best not to use any section heads in the fragments (they cause problems) but lists, code fragments, notes, etc, are all available. See here for links to webpages explaining AsciiDoc.

So as of 2019-10-04 until 2019-10-25 23:59+01:00 the ACCU 2020 CfP is open. As ever there will be no extension of the deadline, and we do not take late submissions.

If you have any questions or problems please email the Conference Chair.