Call for Papers

Turuxi, the Free and Open Source Software user group of Turku, Finland, will organize its annual main event, “Avoimien ohjelmien päivä” (Roughly translates as “Open Software Day”, but is a finnish play on words hard to translate well, abbreviated AOP 2008), on 8th of March 2008. The event theme for 2008 is Free Software in professional use. The event takes the form of a presentation series and booths outside the lecture hall. The target audience consists of experienced Free Software users and ICT students.

Turuxi is seeking for presentations that fit into the theme. There will be four presentations of 45 minutes each. Those willing to hold a presentation can offer them to the organizers at aop2008@turuxi.org by 16.12. The email should include a brief abstract of the proposed presentation that introduces the subject of the presentation and its structure on a rough level. The abstracts should be sent in some widely used and open format, such as odf, pdf or ps.

Those who have sent a proposal will be notified by 06.01. if the presentation has been accepted to the event schedule.

To ease the organization of the event, we would ask the presenters to send their final presentation material to the organizers by 24.02. if at all possible. It would also be preferable if the material was licensed under an appropriate free license (e.g. CC or GFDL) to make it easy to distribute it freely on event pages afterwards.

Presentations that fit to the theme could be e.g. using Free Software to produce professional graphics, music or scientific work. The presentation can focus on a certain software or show how Free Software is being used in some company/school/community. The presentation don’t have to be restricted to Free Software, it can also discuss other forms of Free Culture.

Lightning talks

In addition to the long presentations, we have reserved time for short lightning talks of 5 minutes each. During a lightning talk you can e.g. introduce or advertise an ongoing project of yours or recruit workforce for your company. There are 12 lightning talk slots at the end of the day and you can reserve a time by sending email to aop2008@turuxi.org. When sending a presentation proposal, you can at the same time let us know of your willingness to hold a lightning talk instead if your presentation is not chosen.

If we get more reservations than we have slots, the organizers reserve the right to pick the lightning talks to be held. We will inform the lightning talk requesters of their acceptance on 16.12. at the earliest. If there are still slots left, lightning talks can still be reserved during the event.

Contact information

More information about the event (in finnish) at http://aop.turuxi.org/ or by email (english also) from aop2008@turuxi.org.

Key dates

Presentation abstract: 16.12.2007
Information about presentation acceptance: 06.01.2008
Material of the final version: 24.02.2008

Additional information

This information has been provided in the finnish website separately from the CfP, but we’re including the important bits here for our english readers.

Preparing the presentation

You can expect a thank you email within a couple of days after sending a presentation proposal. If you don’t get one, please send your proposal again.

Auditorium

We have reserved a modern auditorium of 150 seats. It is located at “ICT-talo” (ICT-building), which is the common center of ICT-education for all of the university level schools in Turku (there are three).

We plan to test every presentation beforehand in the auditorium during the evening before the event. For this reason we would like to receive the presentation material beforehand. We will provide a tested computer for the presenter with her/his presentation ready on it.

In addition to a data projector, the room also has a whiteboard. Turuxi will take care that there are working markers available. There is probably also a document camera.

We will list the available equipment before the event. We would like to hear from any special requirements as soon as possible, at the latest when the final material is delivered.

Audience

It is harder than usual to estimate the audience size, since our target group is different from earlier years and the space is about three times larger than the previous largest one. In our earlier events, we have had about 10-50 people per presentation (and 50 would be a full room) and our record during the whole day is 100 different people. This time, we assume that the most interesting presentation will get at least that 50 people. With well-known finnish presenters, we consider there to be a good chance of getting a full room. And with well-known international names, we still have time to get a 250 seat auditorium instead.

We can pretty much guarantee that active F/OSS-people from around Finland will attend. Even though they haven’t been in our target group before, they have regularly arrived from e.g. Lahti, Tornio and Vaasa (i.e. from distant cities in finnish scale). This time our presentations should interest this target group more, so we expect a large part of the audience to fall into this category.

Due to the location of the event and our cooperation with the student association of the ICT students of University of Turku, we expect that a considerable amount of ICT students will attend. Most of them are likely to know the basics of Free Software and they probably use them already. Due to the existence of booths, we expect that there will be senior student looking for employment opportunities, likely at companies where they can work with Free Software.

Most of the ICT companies of Turku are located in the immediate proximity of the ICT-talo, so it can be expected that at least some professionals will attend the event. We assume their participation to depend on the presentation topics and they will likely be more picky about the presentations they attend than the other audience segments.

Luokat:

AOP2008