An Architect's View

I've had a few questions about this so I thought it best to explain how it works. First off, I'm content chair for the conference so, for the most part, I'm driving the process of speaker and topic selection along with a small committee of volunteers and the core conference team. We all got together early in the summer and came up with the tracks:

• Architecture and Design in Software
• RIA - Flex / AJAX / AIR
• Frameworks A-Z
• Process and Tools
• Platform: Database Tuning & (Application / System) Security

The first three are our primary tracks containing the meat of the conference sessions, the last two are secondary tracks covering important topics that are a little more specialized. There has been talk of an "Entrepreneurial" track or mini-track and we're still discussing how best to handle this in the context of a heavily technical conference. Our current thinking is as a structured set of Birds of a Feather sessions (yes, we're going to be a lot more organized about BOFs this year!). Having outlined the tracks, we sat down and laid out potential sessions to mostly fill each track. We came up with broad topic titles so that we would have a good sense of the flow and content of the conference. We wanted both introductory and advanced sessions for several topics so that we can schedule introductory material on Thursday and advanced material on Friday and Saturday (we got complaints last year about putting introductory material at the end of Saturday's schedule - something MAX Europe got some criticism for as well). Thursday won't be all introductory of course but we want to help people get up to speed for the advanced material too. We're trying to maximize the learning everyone can do. Once we had topic suggestions, we picked two potential speakers for almost all topics. We then contacted those people to see whether they would consider speaking - most of them said yes. I posted a call for speakers for the topics where both candidates had declined (or, in some cases, simply proved unreachable). The next step is to ask all of those people (who have agreed to speak) to submit formal session titles and abstracts, along with bios and pictures - I think that will happen this coming week. We're hoping these submissions will be in keeping with our suggested topics but they really are only subject matter guidelines. At that point, we'll also issue a general call for speakers so people can submit session titles and abstracts for any topics. Then we'll review all of the submissions and confirm who has been accepted to speak (and we'll probably keep a few in reserve in case any speakers drop out - we'll make this clear in our response to your submissions). Obviously we'll favor submissions that fall within our original topic guidelines (unless, of course, someone submits something top notch that we simply hadn't thought of). Some people have noticed that I'm not on the speaker list. As content chair it seemed a bit ingenuous to promote myself so, unless we really can't find a good speaker for a topic we consider key (in which case I'll volunteer), I'll be a regular ol' attendee at cf.Objective() 2008!