[PLUG] PLUG Call for Participation

[Michael Dexter]

Hello all,

Thank you for a great interactive meeting last week! It was half new 
people and half long-term PLUG participants and everyone had great 
questions about giving talks and attending conferences.

In an effort to making a conference warrior out of each of you, I would 
like to experiment with a "CFP" or Call for Participation/Papers model 
as is used by most conferences. PLUG will continue to have "invited 
talks" but I know you each have a fascinating talk up your sleeve.

Submissions should include:

A 50 to 300 word description/abstract of the talk

Optional speaker(s) bio(s)

Optional slides to be posted at pdxlinux.org

Optional handouts

Optional extended abstract and full academic paper

Your availability (1st Thursday or 3rd Tuesday and month)

Yes, some conferences require all of these but PLUG is about as flexible 
as it gets. I think we've had everything short of extended abstracts and 
papers. What is an academic paper? I consider it a formal historic 
snapshot of a project you are working on that clearly communicates what 
you set out to do and what you achieved. Tweets and blog posts are nice 
but it is very rewarding to establish a point of reference that with 
luck, will be referred to for decades. One such point of reference is 
Popek and Goldberg's definitive paper on Virtualization from 1974:

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall14/CSCI-GA.3033-010/popek-goldberg.pdf

As a bonus I and perhaps other PLUG members will gladly help you flesh 
out ideas for talks. Any topic can be interesting if addressed from the 
right perspective and at the right depth. We want to hear about your 
unique experiences relating to a given subject. Yes, you are the local 
or possibly world expert on something and it's just a question of 
determining what that something is. If it is of interest to you, it 
certainly is of interest to someone else.

Send your talk proposals to me at dexter at ambidexter.com or to the list 
CC'ing me for peer review and ideas.

I look forward to your submissions!

Next slot: December Advanced Topics, Tuesday the 16th

Michael Dexter
PLUG Volunteer