Proposals

The program for OSCOM III is being prepared collaboratively on the Internet.

Please add your name to our mailing list for participants to be part of this process, and enjoy the proposals.

What kind of conference do you want? This question has arisen repeatedly over the last several weeks, as OSCOM board members and interested parties pondered past conferences, and wondered what to do about the upcoming OSCOM III.

We decided to do a first, to the best of our knowledge: open up the conference preparation process. On the right, you can take a look at the proposals we received and you can add your comments to them. Below you can add general comments about the whole process.

Help us to design the very best conference by joining the discussions on each proposal.

Your OSCOM III Organization Comittee

REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS

Open Source CMS Conference III
Harvard University
May 28-30, 2003 -- , Boston, MA

Call for Participation
Proposals Due: March 15, 2003

The theme of the next OSCOM is "Leveraging content with CMS: authoring and syndication towards the semantic web" Content management treats content as something static more often than not. Content can be much more than that, though. OSCOM III will show attendees how to make more out of the content that is stored in their CMS, how to make content discoverable, provide annotation and other advanced services. OSCOM III will also explore the frontiers with a look at semantic web technologies, and what they might add to content management in the future.

The theme has several aspects:

The Open Source CMS community is rich and varied with many projects such as OpenCMS, Zope, Midgard, PostNuke, Bitflux, Wyona, Cofax, Drupal, RedHat CCM, and many others. In addition, market awareness is rapidly growing, with several Open Source CMS being mentioned favorably in recent Gartner reports, among others.

In this rich open environment, there is room for a variety of presentations on many topics. OSCOM III is a place for CMS developers, integrators and users to mingle and learn from each other. We aim to make the conference as interactive as possible.

Individuals and companies interested in making presentations, giving a tutorial, or participating in panel discussions regarding CMS at OSCOM III are invited to submit proposals. Proposals will be considered in two classes: tutorials and convention presentations (sessions).

Presentations by marketing staff or with a marketing focus will not be accepted; neither will submissions made by anyone other than the proposed speaker. Presentations should add value to the conference. We are not interested in pure product presenations, but would much prefer to receive proposals that cover one of the aspects of the conference and explain these with the help of a particular CMS.

Besides presentations from CMS projects and vendors, we are especially looking for proposals dealing with the legal issues of open content. Part of the conference will be devoted to these topics in cooperation with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

Session presentations are 45 minutes long, and tutorials are a half-day (3 hours). If you are interested in participating in or moderating panel discussions, or otherwise contributing to the conference, please let us know (and please include your area of expertise). If you have an idea for a panel discussion or a particularly provocative group of panelists that you'd love to see square off, feel free to send your suggestions to oc-3@oscom.org.

Submitting Proposals

Proposals may be submitted to oc-3@oscom.org Keep in mind that proposals need not be works of art. A quick summary or abstract of the talk you plan to give is sufficient for consideration. We prefer outlines for tutorials. The proposal is what the conference committees uses to select speakers, so give enough information that the committee can tell what you'll be covering. As the conference approaches, we will request additional information about your proposal as necessary.

NOTE: All presenters whose talks are accepted will receive free registration at the conference. As we want to keep the conference open to as wide an audience as possible, we decided to keep the registration fee under $200 for the whole three days. Therefore, all travel / accomodation allowances will be handled on a case by case basis. Registration will open March 15, 2003.

Important Dates

Proposals Due: March 15, 2003
Speaker Notification: April 1, 2003
Presentation Files Due: April 15, 2003

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