ACCU Conference News

The coronavirus Covid-19 situation is very fluid just now. Many are asking how this affects ACCU 2020. The official position as at 2020-03-03T20:30+00:00 is:

We are obviously concerned about the impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on this year’s ACCU and are closely monitoring what is happening.

Archer Yates, the conference event managers are in close contact with the Association of British Professional Conference Organisers – ABPCO, who are in turn liaising with the UK Government.

Essentially, we see two different scenarios for the conference, depending on how the situation develops:

If the conference moves to some or all online we will refund 50% of the ticket price to all who participate online. This will apply to both the workshops and the conference itself.

Clearly, we still want ACCU to be held, even if for this year it means altering the concept. We will keep everyone informed of how things develop, and we will do all we can to ensure we get through this challenge as a community.

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.