ACCU Conference News

For ACCU 2017, Austin Bingham of Sixty North created an ACCU conference schedule Web application implemented in Elm. After the conference he donated the code to the ACCU Conference. Sadly, despite lots of good intentions, it has not been developed over the year. It seems though right to have it running anyway. So the ACCU 2018 schedule Web application is at https://testconference.accu.org/schedule_app/

If you do want to get stuck in to helping to develop the Web app the master Git repository is at https://github.com/ACCUConf/ACCUConf_Schedule_Web_Application

A couple of people contacted us about this government document that was released 2018-03-09. It named The Marriott Hotel in Luton as having paid workers less than the national minimum wage. The people that contacted us were concerned that ACCU 2018 was being held at a Marriott Hotel (the Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre) and they were worried that Marriott Hotels were paying people less than the minimum wage, and that ACCU should not be associated with such a hotel.

AYA (the ACCU organisers) have had an excellent relationship with the Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre people since we moved from Oxford to Bristol, and we felt confident there was no problem with this hotel. However, we felt it prudent to ask them explicitly about this issue. For sensible reasons, rather than just make a local informal verbal statement, Marriott Hotels head office have created a formal public statement that they have authorised us to publish:

I would like to thank the Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre staff for taking our enquiry seriously, and not only giving AYA verbal assurances, but also "escalating" things so as to get this public statement for us to publish and so explicitly answer the concerns of the people who original raised the issue. Not only can ACCU 2018 go ahead in full knowledge there isn’t an issue, we can continue with our plans for 2019.

There has been lots of activity in ACCU organising over the last two months, but we failed to tell people the news. Our "There is a month to go" resolution is to report more news.

The news of the moment is that we have swapped a couple of sessions: Eoin Woods' session "Common Webapp Vulnerabilities and What to Do About Them" has moved from Wednesday 2018-04-11T16:00+01:00 to Thursday 2018-04-12T16:00+01:00, and Florian Gilcher’s session "Three years of Rust – A look around" has moved a day forward and will be where Eoin’s session was, i.e. it’s a straight swap of schedule slot.

As ever the current state of the schedule is at https://conference.accu.org/2018/schedule.html

Due to some circumstances beyond our control, but also some problems at our end, we failed to meet the posted deadlines of 2018-01-12 for notification, and 2018-01-19 for publishing the schedule.

We have slipped everything by a week from today and should have everything sorted and published by 2018-01-29, but hopefully sooner.

Sorry.

So the ACCU 2018 call for session proposals ended 2017-11-17T23:59+00:00 exactly as anticipated. The committee then went through all the proposals and scored them and, if appropriate, added a comment or two. Also a number of irritants and glitches with the system were noted and added as issues to the source repository^[1].

The committee met, some physically, some via video call, a couple of people had to send their apologies for absence, in Reading Saturday 2017-12-02 to review the situation, and make decisions. Some of the decisions were very hard to make since we had many more excellent session proposals than we have space for in the conference schedule.

It is now necessary to transfer the decisions made into data in the database, make all the consistency and correctness checks, and then we can begin the process of informing people of the results, and doing the sub-editing on scheduled proposals so the session data can be published. Despite the improvements made to the system compared to last year, this remains a non-trivial activity. The question is whether things are ready to send out notifications of acceptance before the Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hogmanay, New Year holiday period. Just at the moment it is not possible to tell.