Today is our second workshop on software research and climate change, at ICSE 2010 in Cape Town. We’ve finalized the program, and we’re hoping to support some form of remote participation, but I’m still not sure how this will work out.
We had sixteen position papers and two videos submitted in the end, which I’m delighted about. To get everyone reading and discussing them prior to the workshop, we set up an open reviewing process, which I think went very well. Rather than the usual closed, anonymous reviews, we opened it up so that everyone could add reviews to any paper, and we encouraged everyone to review in their own name, rather than anonymously. The main problem we had was finding a suitable way of supporting this – until we hit upon the idea of creating a workshop blog, so each paper is a blog post, and the comment thread allows us to add reviews, and comment on each other’s reviews. This is nice because it means we can now make all the papers and reviews public, and continue the discussions during and after the workshop.
We’re trying out two different ways of supporting live remote participation – in the morning, the keynote talk (by Stephen Emmott of Microsoft Research) will be delivered via Microsoft’s LiveMeeting. We tested it out last week, and I’m pretty impressed with it (apart from the fact that there’s no client for the Mac). The setup we’ll be using is to have a video feed of Stephen giving the talk, displayed on a laptop screen at the front of the room, with his slides projected to the big screen. The laptop also has a webcam, so (if it works) Stephen will be able to see his audience too. I’ll document how well this works in a subsequent post.
For the last afternoon session, we’ll be trying out a live skype call. Feel free to send me your skype details if you’d like to participate. I’ve no idea if this will work (as it didn’t last time we tried), but hey, it’s worth exploring…