Call for Papers is now closed. Selected speakers will be notified by the 20th of July

We are please to announce the Open Source Developers Conference is requesting paper submissions for talks. Past conferences have welcomed speakers from all over Australia, Oceania and the world to speak about topics related to Open Source.

If you have a topic you would like to speak on at our conference, please do not hesitate to propose a talk.

Key dates:

Instructions for Presenters

All presentations (except lightning talks) must be accompanied by presentation materials. A detailed paper complementing your talk matter would be preferred - your slides merely illustrate your verbal presentation.

Presentation formats

We will accept the following types of presentation:

Lightning Talks (5 minutes)

You don't need to submit a proposal for a lightning talk. These will be organised from sign-up sheets at the conference. Instructions will be given on the first day.

Lightning talks are brief talks that focus on a single example, idea, project or technique. Lightning talks are not expected to cover all aspects of the subject. They're an excellent forum for first-time speakers.

Standard (30 minutes)

This is the preferred format. 20 minutes for talking and 5 minutes for questions (with 5 minutes spare for set-up and take-down). This is enough time to cover a few issues well and allows us to provide a good selection of talks throughout the day.

Extended (60 minutes)

Extended talks are ideal for experienced speakers who want to cover a large topic. 45 minutes for talking and 10 minutes for questions (with 5 minutes spare for set-up and take-down).

If you choose the longer time slot please include include a request in your proposal.

Submission stages

1. Proposals

Your proposal will need to include:

• your name and a bit of bio info (include a bit about your qualifications regarding your presentation topic)
• name of talk
• a really brief summary of the presentation (around 30 words)
• a description of what you expect to cover (around 200 words)
• who your talk is likely to interest (some keywords)
• likely topic of talk (stream)
• name and bio information of any co-authors

Don't panic. We don't require you to have written the technology that you want to talk about. If you use something in your day to day working life and you think that other people might benefit from using it, then feel free to propose a talk on it.

Email your submission to us on papers@osdc.com.au

2. Proposals acceptance

Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their proposal by the proposal acceptance date. Obviously we'd love to accept as many proposals as we can, but we only have a certain number of sessions to fill.

If you require faster confirmation of acceptance (for example, because you are travelling from overseas and require extra time to make arrangements) please communicate this to the committee when submitting your proposal.

3. Paper Submission

Papers can be submitted via email to papers@osdc.com.au.

All presenters are required to submit presentation materials by the specified date.

This submission is to be your full paper, not a draft. It should contain all of the usual aspects of a paper such as an abstract, introduction, body and conclusion. Please ensure that this submission has had its grammar and spelling corrected and that code snippets work.

Your paper allows attendees who attended your talk a chance to refresh their memories about your presentation, and gives attendees who missed your talk a chance to learn from you anyway. Make sure your paper includes - at the very least - a brief introduction to your subject material and a list of further resources.

We would prefer that papers for standard length talks (30 minutes) be no more than 5 A4 pages of 11-point type with reasonable margins and papers for long talks (60 minutes) be no more than 10 pages. Appropriate file formats include any file that can be read with Open Office (which includes plain text and HTML with minimal mark-up). Slides (even those accompanied by speaker notes) will not be printed in the proceedings.

Papers from previous OSDC conferences provide a good range of sample paper layouts.

By submitting a paper to be published in the proceedings, you are agreeing to the OSDC Publication Agreement.

4. Review results

All papers will be reviewed. The purpose of review is to ensure that papers are of a high quality and to aid our talk scheduling. The purpose is not to identify spelling or grammatical errors or to test code snippets, although errors may be corrected during the review if found. Obviously, we'd strongly recommend you ask a friend or colleague to give your paper a read through before you submit it.

Once your paper has been reviewed, the review results will be provided to you so that you can make the requested improvements for the published version.

5. Proceedings version

This is the final copy of your paper as it will be printed in the conference proceedings.

Speaker Benefits

All OSDC speakers (except for lightning talks) at OSDC will have their conference registration fee waived.

Note that it's important that you get your papers in by the due dates - we reserve the right to withdraw the free registration if you don't get it in on time. If you're having problems meeting the deadlines, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can work with you to figure it out.

If you're a student, please make sure that we know it. We may offer prize(s) for the best student paper submitted.

Contact details

If you have any questions, please contact the OSDC 2009 program commitee.

Stream List

These are the streams defined in the proposal system.
Select as many as are appropriate for your proposal. If your technology or language isn't listed, don't despair! Select 'Other' and include a note in your proposal about what topic(s) you think would be best.

Language Streams

• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• C, C++
• Java
• C#, Mono, OSS.Net

Concept Streams

• Databases
• Education
• Security
• Applications
• Web & Online Technologies
• Emerging Technologies & Innovation
• Development Tools
• Development Process & Project Management
• Licensing, Strategy, Business Models, Case Studies