Here we go having a debate again on Planet Eclipse. I apologize to my readers who don’t follow the Planet. But then you should. It’s always great reading!

As a member the EclipseCon 2007 program committee, I had to take offense to Wassim’s remarks about the “Contraversial” EclipseCon 2007. Now he has all rights to state his opinion and we should all respect it and take a good look at what’s going on. If he’s right, then it is something we need to take a look at and make sure it is corrected.

But I think his statements are a bit off the mark. Bjorn had a nice post that summed up a lot of how I felt about it and agree 100% with what he said there. I’d like to add a bit more from the C/C++ track perspective.

First of all, I submitted a proposal for a short tutorial to the C/C++ track that I supposedly control. I did so because, at the time, I didn’t have any proposals and was afraid that the C/C++ community was going to miss out on the opportunity. After doing a little recruiting I was able to convince a few members of the community to put in much better proposals than mine and I plan on rejecting mine in favour of theirs.

Now, if I do run into the situation that I have too few proposals for the tracks that have been allocated, or they are too weak, I will propose to offer them up to the rest of the Eclipse community to make sure we get good quality content. My understanding from the other committee members is that they plan on doing the same.

You can’t get much more open than actually showing the allocations that have been given to the various tracks. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we were being that open. I’ve never seen it before, and it does open us up for criticism so early in the process.

I guess what hasn’t been made public is that these numbers aren’t necessarily written in stone and that we already have mucked around a bit with them. And we have left the door open to do more of the same. As Bjorn mentioned, we are all focused on making the EclipseCon program the best it can be for the attendees, which will go a long way towards growing our community. And I think it’s a great thing to be doing it in the open for others to comment on and help improve.