Casey Cameron's Weblog

Friday January 14, 2005

What You Want

Chet Haase has set up a new forum on java.net, Planning JavaOne 2005 where you can post suggestions for content – topics and kinds of talks – that would interest you at this year's JavaOne conference.

Don't hold back: we want your input! It's a new year, and we have new energy and resolve to make the conference a deeply satisfying event. Based on last year's surveys, we have a pretty good idea of what went right last year and where we need to improve.

I'll skip the good stuff – we saw lots of “excellent” -- “great conference!” -- “extremely useful and enjoyable” -- and let's turn the corner into the much more interesting “room for improvement.”

[Submitters, take note: these remarks reveal more tips on what not to do.]

Here's what you told us in 2004:

You want meatier talks with deeper dives into the technical details.

• “Most of the sessions were a bit too heavy on 'what' rather than 'how'.”
• “Some sessions, even though they were marked 'Advanced', spent too much time on the basics.”

You want to see more code and get more practical how-to learning.

• “The sessions I appreciated the most were those presenting real-world cases.”
• “My expectations were met in everyway except for the speakers who never opened a code editor, without real code examples.”
• “I was hoping to get more information on "how" and "why" these new packages and APIs could be used and less on a re-hashing of the new features they will contain.”

You expect the sessions to live up to their descriptions (titles and abstracts).

• “Content delivered did not match description in the Program Guide.”
• “Some of the sessions turned into pitches for various products.”
• “A few of the customer presentations claiming to talk about real world deployments never got to the specifics of exactly what was deployed.”

You expect good speakers who are prepared, lively, and easy to understand.

• “Some speakers spoke in a monotone and just read through the slides. ...don't drone on, be excited about what you're saying! “
• “Some of the speakers were hard to understand (thick accents).”

We hear you. To help us focus on these issues, we've put together a new content plan that includes better speaker assessment and reviews of the presentation slides by experts at Sun.

In sum, we're spring-loaded for a great conference this year and encouraged by the submissions so far, so keep those proposals coming: the Call for Papers closes January 31st at midnight!