enabling OOPSLA

I served as Student Volunteers Chair of OOPSLA 2006. People ask me what that means, and I've never been able to come up with a good answer. At least, not until today.

My job at OOPSLA was to enable it to happen. Me and my little army of Student Volunteers were there to keep the conference ticking smoothly. When we ran out of tutorial notes, it was my students who hung out at Kinko's making copies. When there was an error in the final program, it was my students who stood outside the doors of the main keynote, ready to hand out sheafs of paper with the correct information to the attendees. We scheduled the Birds-of-a-Feather meetings. We pointed people in the right direction when they were lost. We even sold our grey fleece vests to attendees who wanted them but couldn't buy them.

My job at OOPSLA is also to enable people to come together. I took some of my students out for pizza and beer on Friday night before the conference and just let them talk: about grad school, about getting publications, about the jobs they might like after graduation. I introduced students to each other when I knew that their research interests matched up. I attended the research talks that my students gave, and gave them feedback about their talk. I checked out each of my students' technical posters, and pointed them towards other people at the conference who might be interesting. I encouraged each of them to talk to people during the conference: talk to the guy sitting next to you in the keynote session, talk to random people during the receptions, don't be afraid to introduce yourself to a speaker or presenter and ask questions.

I have to admit that OOPSLA was a rough conference for me. The number of problems that I had to handle was uncountably infinite. By Monday afternoon, I was on a first-name basis with the guy at Kinko's, and we had placed bets on what my final copy bill would be. (We both lowballed it.) Thursday morning, we had to evacuate the convention centre, losing about an hour out of the day. Afterwards, my students bought cookies and chips for one of the presenters who was concerned that the people attending his talk would get hungry and leave. In all of the years that I've been involved with the OOPSLA SV programme, this was the one at which I worked the hardest during the conference.

But, you know what? It was absolutely worth it. I got to watch my students make friends with their fellow volunteers. I got to listen to them debating geek topics. They played tetrinet in the SV room during our quiet times. They took my advice and talked to the other attendees of the conference, beginning to build their own professional networks. I tried to stay out of their way and just let it happen. I hope that I was successful.

I got really lucky with the programme this year, and somehow was blessed with a hard-working and really smart group of students who were willing to help me make the conference work. This group of students was the best group of student volunteers that I've ever seen.

Now that OOPSLA 2006 is over, it's time to start working on OOPSLA 2007. I'm handing off the reigns of the Student Volunteer programme to someone else, and am taking over as Posters Chair. I have to admit that I'm somewhat ambivalent about this: on one hand, I'm really happy to take a larger technical role at the conference; on the other, I'm going to miss working with the students and enabling them to do really cool things. I hope that I continue to see them at OOPSLA in the future, submitting technical content and moving our field forward.