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FlashBoF
Chair: Rob van den Berg, Siemens VDO Automotive
Birds-of-a-Feathers, or better BoFs have been a long standing tradition at OOPSLA. Quite a number of new products and ideas have been born, nurtured and raised at BoFs (e.g. Eclipse, Squeak). So this year we are going to put BoFs more in the spotlight! Meet the FlashBoF.
FlashBoF is the marriage between a BoF session and an 'open space'. So what is an Open Space? An Open Space meeting is like a formalized coffee break: people getting together to discuss a particular subject. But maybe the following quote from Open Space World describes it better.
In Open Space meetings, events and organizations, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy, group, organization or community that all stake-holders can support and work together to create?
Still pretty vague, I admit, the basic idea with an Open Space is that participants manage their own agenda. Someone who wants to discuss a topic announces it at the start of an Open Space session, and invites others to participate. As an organizer of an Open Space session, he or she then has the responsibility to write minutes or a summary of what was discussed. Another vital point for Open Space meeting is the participation: it is not considered rude to leave a session. Only people interested in the subject should be present, and if the subject is not interesting, leave!
So what does this mean for the FlashBoF?
Instead of using written announcements, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings of the conference FlashBoFs will be held. Each FlashBoF session will last about 90 minutes. People are invited to announce their BoFs with time and place at the conference. A conference Wiki is made available for the BoF organiser to display their BoF results.
