EclipseCon 2008 Call For Participation

EclipseCon 2008 is six months away, and it is time to start submitting proposals for talks. I am on the Program Committee and have been given the task of recruiting for the reporting track. This year, I want to have the best possible talks about reporting in the Eclipse environment possible.

There are three types of talks and reporting has been allocated 11 hours of presentation time. Thats a lot of content to come up with, so I need your help. We really want to see members of the BIRT community submitting proposals for talks.

The reporting category is described as:

Topics that show using Eclipse tools and frameworks for business intelligence and reporting applications. In particular, this category is focused on applications of BIRT project components. We are interested in report development, BIRT integration, using the BIRT extension points, and integration of the BIRT Chart components. Preference will be given to presentations that reflect real world experience.

The reporting category has been given 12 slots as shown below:
- 3 Tutorials (2 hours)
- 4 Long Talks (1 hour)
- 5 Short Talks (10 minutes)

Proposals for talks are done through the EclipseCon 2008 submission process.

We are actively recruiting for high quality talks for all three slots. Our goal is to get as much community involvement as possible. You may say, "Whats in it for me". First, you have a chance to receive recognition for all of the great things that you have done with BIRT. Second, the Tutorials and Long Talks allow you to go to the conference for free. Each short talk is worth a 20% discount on your registration.

What are we looking for? We have two goals: First show off as much of the BIRT technology as possible and second show off the actual implementations of BIRT that you are all doing. In terms of the first goal, we have drawn up some broad objectives on the types of talks we would like to see, so any community submitted talks that will help us achieve those goals will have a strong chance of acceptance.

If you have ideas for talks that are not in the objectives, feel free to submit them. We will give careful consideration to all reporting proposals. The presentations are not limited to BIRT, but have to in some way involve Reporting and Eclipse.

The deadline for submissions is the November 19, so please make your submissions as soon as possible.

The BIRT PMC Objectives for EclipseCon talks:

Tutorials (3 allocated two hours each)
* Basic
* Integration / Report Engine
* Integration / Design Engine
* Extension (Data Extension to be covered under Data Tools)
* Charting

Long Talks (4 allocated one hour each)
* Introduction to BIRT
* Customer Success Story
* Advanced BIRT Report Dev (DataCube/Pivot, Expressions, Event Handlers, Libs, and CSS)
* Charting
* Integration (Report Engine / Design Engine)

Short Talks (1 hour – 5 talks allocated ten minutes each)
* Features Hour
o Parameters & Script
o Charts
o Re-Use (Libs & Styles)
o Layout
o Features Q&A

* Customer Hour
o Four stories from our customers on how they used BIRT. (ten minutes each)
o Followed by a joint Q&A with the four customers and one team member.
o customer Q&A