the progression of an idea at OOPSLA
For OOPSLA 2008, one of the goals of the conference is to re-think how industry should be involved with presenting content at the conference. Historically, the venues which have the highest industry involvement are practitioner reports and panels. As Development Co-Chair, I've been thinking about this question.
Lately, I’ve been focusing on the progression of an idea at OOPSLA. I don't think that we've done the best job at taking ideas from our research track and nurturing them in such a way that we see how it works when it makes it out into more widespread use in the industry.
One possible way for an idea to progress at OOPSLA is:
- research poster
- research paper
- industry poster
- practitioner report
This isn't the only way that an idea could progress, of course. There doesn't have to be a poster, or you could add in a demo at some point in here. Or maybe it should continue on through a tutorial or workshop. And not all ideas should follow this kind of progression; their work ends up in use in other contexts. For example, I’m not sure that a paper about garbage collection would end up in there (well, unless the Xcode team wanted to submit a practitioner report that talks about adding garbage collection). Just as all research papers probably won’t end up in a development paper in the future, not all practitioner reports (or other submissions from industry) will start off from a research paper. I think that this is fine — there is room for expansion, room for growth.
My goal is to better provide a natural progression from research to industry. OOPSLA as a conference is uniquely positioned to provide that kind of natural progression.