[Foss4g2013] presentations and workshops

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 11:16 AM, Herbert, David J. <darb1 at bas.ac.uk> wrote:
> I have a few questions about what's expected in terms of presentations and workshops at FOSS4G 2013.  Last April, I attended FOSS4G NA in Washington DC and gave a half-hour presentation on the use of FOSS here at British Antarctic Survey.  I would very much like to build on this and give a presentation at the Nottingham conference this year, but am a bit confused by the information on the website regarding how I go about this.
>
> Are all presentations at the conference to be accompanied by a formally submitted academic paper?  Clearly there is a bigger time commitment in preparing something like this, over what it would take to prepare a half hour presentation.  If it is possible to present without submitting a paper, could this be made clear and the deadlines published on the website?

 Hi David,

  there are two separate submission processes, and you are right that
the web pages aren't too clear about this. We are discussing how to
clarify it.

 Firstly there is the submission of presentations, which will only
require a title and abstract, and won't require a full paper. The
mechanism for submitting these isn't up yet. Presentation proposal
abstracts will be assessed by a committee of experts and a community
vote. The final selection will take into account these opinions and
the need to create a balanced conference. You'll end up with a
presentation that you can cite as a conference talk.

 Secondly, there's the Academic Track submission. This is for full
paper submissions, which will be anonymously peer-reviewed. The top
papers will be considered for inclusion in Transactions in GIS. Do
that, and you'll end up with a paper you can cite as a paper in a
peer-reviewed journal.

> Regarding workshops, I would like to know what kind of format is expected here.  Is a series of related presentations and questions/discussion following an acceptable format?  I have an idea to get a group of people from the Natural Environment Research Council centres in the UK to give a themed series of talks on use of FOSS to serve environmental science.  Is this something that would work?

 Most of the workshops at previous FOSS4Gs have been very hands-on -
tutorials on how to get data into GeoServer, or advanced styling with
QGis, that sort of thing. Check the first couple of days of the Denver
programme for example:

http://2011.foss4g.org/program/session-schedule

 I'll defer judgement on your thematic workshop idea to the workshop
sub-committee, but it might be that if your group of people submit
several presentations on FOSS in ES and they get accepted you could
end up with a whole session in the regular programme.

 Hope this clarifies things.

Barry