BorCon 2005 Call for Papers Clarified

For the benefit of those who don’t read the borland.public.conference newsgroup, here’s a message that John Kaster posted clarifying the BorCon Call for Papers:

We’ve noticed the alarm expressed in this newsgroup regarding speaker compensation for BorCon, and the concern about the level and quality of speakers who will attend BorCon/DevCon and its possible impact on people attending.

We have a budget for invited speakers to ensure our best speakers are still interested in speaking at BorCon, and we will use it. This is a change from previous years.

We’re sorry this wasn’t communicated to our best speakers in advance of the call for papers going live. The schedule for publishing the web site got shuffled a bit, and caught us by surprise.

Furthermore, while we don’t have an "advisory board" this year, we do have an invited "review board" that will ensure the best technical content possible for the conference.

See you in San Francisco!

It will be interesting to see who is invited. BorCon has always been excellent due to the high quality of the speakers in the technical sessions. I could pass on everything else; the general sessions, the keynotes, and the booths don’t interest me much (except for Boz Elloy’s SDO presentation last year, which was actually interesting). I go to hear the technical sessions, and in the past it’s always been time and money well-spent.

So here’s my advice to Borland (not that anyone asked): Publish the list of invited speakers who accept as soon as possible. Even with John’s clarification, it isn’t clear that there’s a process in place to ensure that speaker quality will be as high as in previous years. But the proof is in the pudding, and if the speakers are good then I want to go.

If Borland sees fit to "invite" me to speak, then I’ll be happy to submit session proposals. The amount of time and effort I’ve put into my previous BorCon presentations is far too high to undertake without any compensation other than conference admission, and I’m not about to lower the quality of my talks.

UPDATE (22 March 2005): The conference speaker information page has been updated to reflect the clarification John posted to the newsgroups.

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