I've learned my best things from tutorials when I arrogantly considered myself both an insider and above-it-all. I went to a tutorial in 1998, from LukeHohmann, and learned perhaps the most important lesson about how to make architectures truly useful. Luke's comment was more about an after-the-fact kind of study, in looking at groups to see if they had a useful architecture. The test was quite simple. He asked people on the project to draw a picture of the system architecture. From this, he learned that the important aspects of the particular system's archticture was a shared picture - everyone drew that part the same; the other parts of the system were drawn differently, implying less group cohesion.
I took exactly this approach and turned it around. If drawing the picture the same implied a shared understanding, what if I forced everyone to draw the picture the same, to imply the same understanding.
This wisdom came from Luke's tutorial, though that wasn't my principal reason for attending - I simply had some spare time and it was free to go.
My conclusion from this: we need to encourage MORE PEOPLE to attend tutorials - it's a generator of ideas for the top of the heap, and a good way to hear what issues other people are having.
Last year I tried to do this by force (ultimately this concept was rejected by SIGPLAN, but I think I should have done it anyways): My thought was to increase the registration fee by the price of one tutorial unit, and then include a "free tutorial unit" into the comments about what comes with a registration. This would have done 2 things for OOPSLA 2003 - a) it would have increased the overall revenue (I don't have the numbers at hand, but for 2002 the number of people with 0 tutorial units was ~60%), and b) it would have encouraged more people to sit in on tutorials, or at least try hard to find one to attend.
I still believe this is a good idea, and even if a) doesn't work out, b) will.
-- RonCrocker (16 JUN 04)
- sjm
One venue I attended provided MeetTheExpert events. That haven't been tutorials like at OOPSLA but may be that is a valuable title. With respect to the name of this page, also In2Action (spelled in-square-action) for InsiderInterAction might be a cool name?
- PeterSommerladI'm not sure about this. I always liked to attend tutorials, but I hesitated to shell out the money, so I think it is rather InsidersDontWantToPayForTutorials. (Summary of that page: It's not so much, IMO, that insiders are above learning but paying for it creates a status relationship that is not one of being peers with the tutorial presenter. Hence, assuming lots of insiders are audience attractors etc. they should get into tutorials for free.)
How about InsidersDontHaveTimeToAttendTutorials. I'm only at OOPSLA for a week;
apart from running my own events, the next most important thing is to catch up with people that I know (who may or may not be insiders). More often than not,I'm double booked half the time, and sometimes-this time, I think-there are three
things I'd like to do on the Sunday, none of which are tutes.If there was a 'gold pass' or something then I might go, but if I had the funds I would probably send students instead. I'm all in favour of more freebies for 'insiders' but not sure how this will help.
InsidersDontHaveTimeToAttendTutorials accepted. Some insiders do no longer take tim to learn anything new and tend to RejectWhatYouDoNotKnow. We need to do something about Insiders rejecting new topics with onliners "because they do not know if the submitter has taken into account ..." fill out the blancs with the one cheap (often wrong) book about the topic.
This problems is more accute for tutorials and workshops. Nobody knows all these topics. Fine. But then lets not pretend. Can we make it safe -- by installing a CenterForSafeToDoNotKnow -- to contact a group that can search for people who do know the topic, to get second or third opinions... or refer to Onward... MartineDevos