A technology is disruptive, if it allows small new companies to shake up an established market and win against establish large companies.

I got asked three times this week what “disruptive” means so here is my definition

August 27-29, 2012 | Linz, Austria

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2012, WikiSym celebrates its 8th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Linz, Austria.  We are excited this year to be collocated with Ars Electronica, the premier digital art and science meeting that attracts over 35,000 attendees per year.

Submissions are invited for the following categories:

[1] As determined at the International Date Line. In other words, as long as it’s still April 7th or April 27 somewhere on Earth, the system will accept your submissions.

The conference program will include a peer-reviewed research track, experience reports, workshops, posters, demos, a doctoral consortium, invited keynotes and panel speakers. As always, the participant-organized Open Space track will run throughout the conference. Evening social events will follow, because wiki folks know the value of a good party for sparking conversation and collaboration. Finally, WikiSym co-occurs with Ars Electronica, and we are arranging experiences where conference attendees can enjoy this innovative and unusual event.

Topics appropriate for submissions include all aspects of the people, tools, contexts, and content that comprise open collaboration systems. For example:

• Collaboration tools and processes
• Social and cultural aspects of collaboration
• Collaboration beyond text: images, video, sound, etc.
• Communities and workgroups
• Knowledge and information production
• New media literacies
• Uses and impact of wikis and other open resources, tools, and practices in fields and application areas, for example:
• Open source software development and use
• Education and Open Educational Resources
• E-government, open government, and public policy
• Law/Intellectual Property (including Creative Commons)
• Journalism (including participatory journalism)
• Art and Entertainment (including collaborative and audience-involved art)
• Science (including collaboratories)
• Publishing (including open access and open review models)
• Business (including open and collaborative management styles)

In addition to research and development topics, WikiSym also invites innovative proposals for open, collaborative art and performance.  These proposals should be made directly to the conference chairs.

General submission instructions and information

All accepted submissions will be published in the WikiSym proceedings and archived in the ACM Digital Library. Long and short research papers will be rigorously peer reviewed and treated as archival publications. Submissions to other tracks will also be reviewed and appear in the ACM DL, but they are considered to be non-archival and may be used as the basis for later publications. Authors of research papers should use the ACM/CHI SIG Proceedings Format, and other contribution types will use the ACM/CHI Extended Abstracts Format. Templates for both formats are available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

General submission instructions will be posted and the conference submission site opened around March 1. Instructions for the various contribution types are below.

Research Papers – Long (up to 10 pages) and Short (up to 4 pages)

Research papers present integrative reviews or original reports of substantive new work: theoretical, empirical, and/or in the design, development and/or deployment of novel systems.

Research papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee to meet rigorous academic standards of publication. Papers will be reviewed for relevance, conceptual quality, innovation and clarity of presentation. They should be written in English and must not exceed 10 pages (for full papers) or 4 pages (for short papers). At least one author of accepted papers is required to attend the conference in order to present the paper.

Workshops (up to 6 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

Workshops provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to discuss and learn about topics that require in-depth, extended engagement such as new systems, research methods, standards, and formats.

Workshop proposals should describe what you intend to do and how your session will meet the criteria described above. It should include a concise abstract, proposed time frame (half-day or full-day), what you plan to do during the workshop, and one-paragraph biographies of all organizers. Workshop proposals will be reviewed and selected for their interest to the community. Each accepted workshop will be provided with a meeting room for either a half or full day. Organizers may also request technology and materials (projector, flip pads, etc).

Panels (up to 6 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

Panels provide an interactive forum for bringing together people with interesting points of view to discuss compelling issues around open collaboration. Panels involve participation from both the panelists and audience members in a lively discussion. Proposals for panels should describe the topics and goals and explain how the panel will be organized and how the Wikisym community will benefit. It should include a concise abstract and one-paragraph biographies of panelists and moderators. Panel submissions will be reviewed and selected for their interest to the community. Each panel will be given a 90-minute time slot.

Experience Reports (up to 16 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

Experience reports are an integral part of the conference program. These are opportunities to discuss how ideas that sound good on paper (and at conferences!) work in real life projects and deployments. Many attendees want to learn from people on the front lines what it is like to do things like start a company wiki, use open collaboration tools in a classroom, or build a political campaign around open collaboration systems. Experience reports are not research papers; their goal is to present experience and reflections on a particular case, and they are reviewed for usefulness, clarity and reflection. Strong experience reports discuss both benefits and drawbacks of the approaches used and clearly call out lessons learned. Reports may focus on a particular aspect of technology usage and practice, or describe broad project experiences.

Posters (up to 4 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

Poster presentations enable researchers to present late-breaking results, significant work in progress, or work that is best communicated in conversation. WikiSym’s lively poster sessions let conference attendees exchange ideas one-on-one with authors, and let authors discuss their work in detail with those attendees most deeply interested in the topic. Poster proposals may describe original research, engineering, or experience reports. Successful applicants will display their posters, up to 1x2m in size, at a special session during the Symposium.

Demos (up to 4 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

No format is better suited for demonstrating the utility of new collaboration technologies than showing and using them. Demonstrations give presenters an opportunity to show running systems and gather feedback. Demo submissions should provide a setup for the demo, a specific description of what you plan to demo, what you hope to get out of demoing, and how the audience will benefit. A short note of any special technical requirements should be included. Demo submissions will be reviewed based on their relevance to the community.

Doctoral Symposium

The WikiSym 2012 Doctoral Symposium is a forum in which Ph.D. students can meet and discuss their work with each other and a panel of experienced researchers and practitioners. The symposium will be held on Tuesday August 28 on the campus of Johannes Kepler University. More information about the symposium’s leaders, goals, submission process and criteria, and funding will be posted shortly.

Open Space

For short and informal opportunities to organize discussion, brain-storming, and other collaborative activities, the Open Space track will run throughout WikiSym. Open Space is an entirely participant-organized track and requires no submission or review.

Note on Publications

Work submitted to Wikisym is published in the ACM digital library. This means it is not open access. However, ACM has a very new service called ACM Author-izer which allows authors to post official copies of their papers on personal websites for people to access, even if those people do not have access to the ACM digital library. We see this as a step to open access and are pleased to support this service.

http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service

• Understanding and using patterns in software development (with Heinz Züllighoven)

It just reached the 200-citation boundary. Hard on its heels are these:

• Role model based framework design and integration (with Thomas Gross)
• Composite design patterns
• Role object (with Dirk Bäumer, Wolf Siberski, and Martina Wulf)

The fastest growing paper (in terms of citations) is this 2007 paper:

• The economic motivation of open source software: Stakeholder perspectives

The “leading” papers are all older papers, as implied by using citations as a measure of relevance. Of course I’m looking forward to my new open source publications catching up on the software engineering papers. Now back to my employer’s year end report, sigh.

Our paper provides a high-quality model of a key aspect of programming behavior in open source, basically the modeling behind this earlier empirical paper. As such, it is a descriptive empirical paper. It takes a large amount of data and provides an analytically closed model of the data so that we can explain or predict the future (better). That’s pretty standard operating procedure in most of natural and social sciences.

Suggest to a physicist that a paper that explains how a particle spins can only be published if in the same paper the physicist shows how to make the particle spin backwards. Or contribute to human well-being. He or she will give you the finger. Suggest to a sociologist that it is not enough to understand medical practices in a hospital, that he or she in the same paper also has to provide empirical validation on how to improve these practices. You’ll be out the door before you can say I’m sorry.

Only in engineering research do we seem to see no value in seeking knowledge and truth for its own sake. Only in engineering research is merit defined by how some work improves the world. Maybe that’s why many don’t consider it a science. It seems obvious to me that before improvement comes understanding, but in repeated experiences with ICSE and elsewhere, reviewers consistently require that both of it has to be packaged into the same 10 page paper. I think this is ludicrous.

I can accept an argument that some particular knowledge is of little merit because it is uninteresting. I cannot accept the requirement that deep and interesting insight only gains publishable merit by being combined with its application in some context.

Happy new year and a successful 2012 to everyone!

Dirk

PS: Some explanation for those not working in computer science / software engineering. ICSE is the top conference of the field, by most measures, and ranks higher than the journals. (Which is another weird thing about computer science, but not of concern here.) Computer scientists don’t like to read (a lot) and hate discursive papers (try publishing Grounded Theory work) so many publishing outlets have stringent page requirements, typically 10 pages or 10000 words.

Reference: Dirk Riehle, Carsten Kolassa, Michel A. Salim. “Developer Belief vs. Reality: The Case of the Commit Size Distribution.” In Proceedings of Software Engineering 2012 (SE ’12). Springer Verlag, 2012.

The paper is available as a PDF file. The survey used in the paper is also available as a PDF file.

Zusammenfassung: In fast jedem Softwareprodukt, auch in großer Standardsoftware, sind heute Open-Source-Komponenten enthalten. Die Hersteller dieser Software müssen die Geschäftsrisiken, die mit der Integration von Open-Source-Software in kommerzielle Produkte verbunden sind, verstehen und vernünftig managen. Dieser Artikel zeigt ein Modell verschiedener rechtlicher, technischer und sozialer Risiken auf, die durch unkontrollierten Einsatz von Open-Source-Software entstehen und erläutert ausgewählte Erfolgsmethoden der Open-Source-Governance, die von führenden Firmen angewandt werden. Das Modell ist das Analyseergebnis von fünf mit großen deutschen Softwareherstellern geführten Interviews sowie weiterer Literaturrecherche.

Stichwörter: Open-Source-Komponenten, Open-Source-Governance, Geistiges Eigentum, Code-Scanner, Softwareprodukte

Referenz: Martin Helmreich, Dirk Riehle. “Geschäftsrisiken und Governance von Open-Source in Softwareprodukten”. In Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik (HMD 283) 49. Jahrgang, Februar 2012.

Inhaltsübersicht

1. Open-Source-Komponenten in kommerziellen Produkten
2. Methodisches Vorgehen
3. Grundlagen zum geistigen Eigentum
4. Identifizierte Geschäftsrisiken
   1. Unkontrollierter und ungeregelter Einsatz von Open-Source-Komponenten
   2. Aktive Beiträge in der Open-Source-Community
   3. Verwicklung in ein Gerichtsverfahren
   4. Verpflichtung, Source-Code offenzulegen
   5. Verurteilung wegen einer Patentverletzung
5. Beispiele für Erfolgsmethoden
1. Überwachung der Lieferantenschnittstelle
2. Einsatz von Code-Scannern
3. Entwicklerausbildung
6. Integration in den Entwicklungszyklus
7. Literatur

Der Artikel ist zur Zeit nicht frei verfügbar. Sie können aber über mich eine Vorabversion erhalten. Dazu nehmen Sie bitte Email-Kontakt mit mir auf. Sechs Monate nach Veröffentlichung wird der Artikel dann hier direkt als PDF zur Verfügung stehen.

THE 8th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS

Hammamet, Tunisia, 10-13 September 2012

Scope of OSS 2012

Over the past two decades, Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has introduced new successful models for creating, distributing, acquiring and using software and software-based services. Inspired by the success of FLOSS, other forms of open initiatives have been gaining momentum. Open source systems (OSS) now extend beyond software to include open access, open documents, open science, open education, open government, open cloud, open hardware, open artworks and museum exhibits, open innovation and more. On the one hand, the openness movement has created new kinds of opportunities such as the emergence of new business models, knowledge exchange mechanisms, and collective development approaches. On the other hand, the movement has introduced new kinds of challenges, especially as different problem domains embrace openness as a pervasive problem solving strategy. OSS can be complex yet widespread and often cross-cultural. Consequently, they require an interdisciplinary understanding of their technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.

The goal of 8th International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2012, the first to be held in Africa, is to provide an international forum where a diverse community of professionals from academia, industry and public sector, and diverse OSS initiatives can come together to share research findings and practical experiences. The conference is also meant to provide information and education to practitioners, identify directions for further research, and to be an ongoing platform for technology transfer, no matter which form of OSS is being pursued.

OSS 2012 accepts submissions in the following categories: research papers, industry papers, formal tool demonstrations, lightning talks and posters. OSS 2012 also invites proposals for tutorials and workshops, submissions to the doctoral symposium, and submissions of panels. Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings, which are published by Springer. The major conference theme is long-term sustainability with OSS.

Topics of Interest

OSS sustainability

• Sustainability models of OSS
• Building sustainable OSS communities
• Role of OSS in ICT and sustainable development
• Mining sustainability related data from OSS communities
• Experience reports and lessons on sustainable OSS ecosystems

OSS as innovation

• Adoption/ use / acceptance of OSS
• Dissemination / redistribution / crowdsourcing of OSS systems
• Expanding scientific research and technology development methods through openness
• Adopting innovation in OSS projects

OSS practices and methods

• OSS and traditional / agile development methods
• OSS and decentralized development
• Knowledge and documentation management in OSS

OSS technologies

• OSS over the Internet
• Security of OSS
• Interoperability / portability / scalability of OSS
• Open standards / open data / open cloud / open hardware / open exhibits
• Reuse in OSS
• OSS for entertainment
• OSS for education
• Architecture and design of OSS

Economic / organizational / social issues on OSS

• Economic analysis of OSS
• Business models of OSS
• Maturity models of OSS
• OSS in public sector
• OSS intellectual property, copyrights and licensing
• Non-Governmental Organizations and OSS

Important Dates (Deadlines)

1. Submissions due: March 9, 2012
2. Workshop proposals: March 16, 2012
3. Panels and tutorials proposals: May 25, 2012
4. Results to authors: April 13, 2012
5. Camera-ready copy due: May 11, 2012
6. Early registration: June 15, 2012

Submission

Upload contributions in PDF format at http://oss2012.org/.

Organization

General Chairs

• Walt Scacchi, University of California, Irvine, USA
• Tommi Mikkonen, Tampere University of Technology, Finland

Program Chairs

• Imed Hammouda, Tampere University of Technology, Finland
• Björn Lundell, University of Skövde, Sweden

Local Organizing Chairs

• Said Ouerghi, University of Manouba, Tunisia
• Khaled Sammoud, University of Tunis el Manar, Tunisia

Call for Papers 征稿启事

The European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) is the premium international conference covering all areas of object technology and related software development technologies. ECOOP 2012 will take place from 11-16 June, 2012 in Beijing, China — only the second time ECOOP has been held outside Europe. ECOOP 2012 embraces a broad range of topics related to object-orientation, including:

• Analysis and design methods and patterns
• Databases, persistence, transactions
• Concurrent, parallel, distributed, mobile, and real-time systems
• Empirical and application studies
• Frameworks, product lines, software architectures
• Language design and implementation
• Modularity, aspects, features, components, services, reflection
• Software development environments and tools
• Static and dynamic software analysis, testing, and metrics
• Theoretical foundations, type systems, formal methods
• Versioning, compatibility, software evolution

ECOOP 2012 solicits high quality submissions describing original and unpublished results. Papers will be evaluated according to originality and significance, precision and correctness, presentation and clarity, and relevance. Incremental improvements over previously published work should have been evaluated through systematic, comparative, empirical or experimental evaluation. Submissions of papers describing groundbreaking approaches to emerging problems will be considered based on timeliness and potential impact.

Only papers that have not been published and are not under review for publication elsewhere may be submitted. Double submissions will be rejected without review. Authors are required to disclose prior publication (formal or informal) of parts of the paper submitted to ECOOP or of closely related papers. Such prior publications must be cited and their relationship to the current submission explained. Authors are also required to inform the ECOOP 2012 program chair about closely related work submitted to another conference while the ECOOP submission is under review.

Submissions will be carried out electronically via CyberChair. Papers must be written in English, and be no longer than 25 pages, including references, appendices and figures, and written using the LNCS style. For more information about formatting please consult the Springer LNCS web site at http://www.springer.com. Clearly marked additional appendices, not intended for the final publication, containing supporting proofs, analyses, statistics, etc, may be included beyond the 25 page limit. The paper must stand alone, however, and reviewers are under no obligation to read any additional appendices. Reviewers are more likely to consult additional appendices rather than separate technical reports. ECOOP papers will be reviewed by the programme committee and additional expert reviewers: authors will have the opportunity to respond to reviews before the programme committee meeting.

For ECOOP 2012, submissions that have been submitted but not accepted by previous prestigious conferences (such as ECOOP, OOPSLA, POPL, PLDI, ICSE, or AOSD) may additionally submit a Note to Reviewers. The Note to Reviewers should a) identify the previous venue(s) (e.g. ECOOP’2011, OOPSLA’2010); b) list the major issues identified by the reviews at those venues; and c) describe the changes made to the paper in response to those reviews.

Important dates 重要日期

Submission deadline

17 December 2011, 23:59 (Samoa)

Author rebuttals

13-14 February 2012

Acceptance notification

29 February 2012

More information

For more information, see the ECOOP 2012 website.

Call for Contributions (SPLC 2012)

We invite the following classes of contributions:

1. Research papers: (max. 10 pages, 5 for short papers) describe original research contributions (theoretical, conceptual) to the field of software product line engineering. We also call for short research papers, which are intended to report ideas in their early stages. Submission deadline: Feb. 20th, 2012.
2. Industrial papers: (max. 10 pages for full, 5 for short papers) describe experience in introducing, implementing and evolving product lines and success stories or problem reports of applications of product line engineering methods, techniques and tools in industry. Submission deadline: Feb. 20th, 2012. All research and full industry papers will be included in the conference proceedings, which will be published through the ACM Digital Library.
3. Workshops: The purpose of the workshop program is to provide a forum for bringing together people from industry, academia, and research institutions to present and discuss research results and practices. Workshops should be organized as full-day events. Submission deadline: March 1st, 2012.
4. Tutorials: Tutorials will be held during the conference week in full-day or half-day sessions. A tutorial proposal consists of two pages describing the topic, the plan for conducting the tutorial, and the backgrounds of the presenters and the tutorial. We explicitly invite tutorials that have been held at other events. Submission deadline: March 1st, 2012.
5. Submissions to Hall of Fame: Each SPLC culminates with a session in which members of the audience nominate systems for induction into the Software Product Line Hall of Fame. Those nominations feed discussions about what constitutes excellence and success in product lines. More information on nominations and election can be found at the conference website or at http://www.splc.net/fame.html
6. Demonstrations and Tools: Demonstrations show the application of novel product line engineering concepts and techniques in practice. The demonstration with realistic use cases is encouraged. Submission deadline: April 30th, 2012.
7. Doctoral Symposium: The Doctoral Symposium gives doctoral students the opportunity to discuss their research plans with experienced members of the community. Submission deadline: May 18th, 2012.

Further information regarding the submission processes and submission dates can be found in the separate calls on the website http://www.splc2012.net/ We invite you to be part of SPLC!

Information regarding sponsoring can be found on the website.

For further information please contact contact@splc2012.net.