As publicized by the ALM Forum Twitter account, the OASIS OSLC Member Section is a Gold Sponsor for next Spring’s conference. OSLC community members are encouraged to submit presentation proposals, for any of the four tracks, by November 22. Ideally there will be sufficient OSLC submissions for a complete OSLC junkie (like me) to spend most of the conference learning about OSLC.
The ALM Forum, which runs April 1-3, 2014 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, represents a great opportunity to achieve the three goals the OSLC Steering Committee established for OSLC Connect events. The ALM Forum, with its broad audience of business and technical leaders, most of whom are not currently involved in the OSLC community, seems to be an especially good place to fulfill the second goal, namely, to “facilitate the sharing of information from experienced OSLC community members to potential OSLC community members”. Whether you’ve participated in OSLC spec creation, built OSLC implementations, or simply become an expert user of OSLC-based integrations, if you’ve got an interesting story related to OSLC, we want to see a presentation submission from you.
I think “story” is the key element to consider. While we also hope many you in the OSLC community will attend the ALM Forum, and we hope to run a BoF session on OSLC just for you, most of the participants may not know about OSLC, or only have a vague impression of it. Bluntly, it isn’t “in your face” OSLC presentations that we, as a community, need to submit. We need presentations that explore the larger trends and challenges facing organizations, trends and challenges that “just happen” to be addressed (at least in part) by using OSLC. It’s not that I’m encouraging shifty behavior, I’m trying to encourage you to present OSLC in the broader organizational context that led you to get involved in the first place. Besides, this approach is also more interesting and informative to current OSLC community members who may be attending your talk too.
While details and instructions for submitting session proposals are available on the ALM Forum website, we've also created a web form that you can use to submit your session. The benefit of using the form is that the OSLC Connect Planning Committee will know what you've submitted and have the chance to champion your submission to the track chairs. Go ahead and submit to any of the tracks.
Here are some ideas for the kinds of presentations you might submit for the four different tracks:
- For the Business of Software Delivery track, you might want to focus on how your approach to product delivery has changed (and may still be changing) driven by regulations, new ways of working (such as Agile, DevOps, and Lean), and customer expectations.
- For the Lifecycle Architecture & Integration track (chaired by Mik Kersten of the OSLC Steering Committee, and a natural fit for many OSLC-related topics), you might take a similar tack, but go deeper into the details how you really make it work in practice.
- For the Practices of DevOps track, you might take it as a given that DevOps is a Good ThingTM and explore your journey from a “traditional” organization to one that delivers continuously.
- For the Changing Role of Test track, you might share how both development and operations have been improved by stronger connections between tests and requirements (and/or architecture/modeling).
Whether you plan to submit a presentation, or simply to attend (there are no other options I can think of), I hope you will share this big news with your friends and colleagues. OSLC used to be sponsored by IBM; we’ve had OSLC hospitality suites sponsored by IBM, Kovair, PointSource, Siemens, and Tasktop; but now, OSLC is sponsoring the ALM Forum. For the first time at a conference, OSLC is making its own way and paying its own bills.
See you in Seattle, and keep your eye here for more news on OSLC Connect @ the 2014 ALM Forum.