The European style Lisp conference
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Pascal Costanza has been periodically posting notices regarding
the "
1st European Lisp and Scheme Workshop" on various
newsgroups. Some of the
papers are already online and it looks like it is going to be an
interesting workshop. Wish I could make it to
Oslo to
attend.
The workshop is being co-located with the 18th European
Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP). This is an interesting approach to organizing a Lisp
conference and I wonder whether it is an approach that should also be
adopted for Lisp conferences in the USA. The benefits (as I see them)
are:
- Less organization effort: Since the conference is "tagging on" to a larger conference, most of the administrative details can be handled by the parent conference committee. The ILC2002 and ILC2003 Lisp conferences were great conferences to attend; however, they were organized by volunteers who also had a day job and (from discussions with a number of the ALU committee) were a huge effort to organize.
- Financial advantages: Since the Lisp conference is held in conjunction with a larger conference, there are potential cost savings that the attendees could realize in lower costs for hotel and conference materials (typically rates are negotiated by the conference organizers based on number of attendees). The ALU has organized previous Lisp conferences (with some vendor support) and it is a non-profit organization without a paid staff or advertising budget. By co-locating with a larger conference, the Lisp workshop could potentially utilize staff, resources and advertising provided for the larger conference at a much lower cost. Also, conferences are always a financial risk for the organizers. There are many outside factors that can contribute to make a conference financially successful or unsuccessful. Co-locating reduces the financial risk for the organizers.
- More frequent/focused Lisp conferences: Instead of trying
for an annual "big bang" Lisp conference, smaller, more focused
Lisp conferences could be scheduled. This could have several positive
effects:
- Make it easier for Lisp programmers who program for a specific domain (e.g. -- bioinformatics, robotics, AI) to justify expensing the conference.
- Make the conference more "appealing" (for both attendees and their sponsoring companies/organizations) as the combined conference is more domain-focused rather than language-focused.
- Make the sessions more relevant and targetted to the attendees.
- More conferences in different geographic locations makes it easier for people in different parts of the USA to attend a given conference.
- Expose non-Lispers to Lisp.
