Here's what has been suggested by a couple of guys so maybe we should start with considering whether having a three-day conference (like 2008) or a five-day conference that overlaps with Mon-Tu-Wed presentations overlapping on Wed-Thu-Fri and having two tracks.
One track would be "How to do it" kind of presentations where someone would have 90 minutes to tell, start-to-finish, how a real-life project was actually done. This would begin with the problem statement, definition compromises, knowledge acquisition, basic design, tools used, some example rules, etc. However, only one presentation about a bank project, one presentation about an insurance project, one project about a medical diagnosis, one problem about configuration management, one project about ... You get the idea. All presentations would be submitted and "The Selection Committee" would pick the ones that we think that most of the attendees would like to see.
The second track could be tutorials, demonstrations, labs by various vendors, etc. (I'm not crazy about this one and if nobody wants it we can just not do it.)
The second track could be something practical like different ways of looking at things. For example, we could do one on ontology (we had two of those at ORF 2008), or maybe another one how to make rules work with Neural Nets or one on using rules with Decision Simulators, etc.
I would think that Monday morning would begin about
- 8:00 - 9:00 registration.
- 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 Keynote from some industry leader. ONLY ONE KEYNOTE all week.
- 10:30 - 12:30 Session 1 for both tracks
- 12:30 - 2:00 Lunch
- 2:00 - 3:30 Session 2
- 3:45 - 4:15 Session 3
- 4:30 - 6:00 Session 4
Tuesday
- 9:00 - 10:30 Session 5
- 10:45 - 12:15 Session 6
- 12:15 - 2:00 Lunch
- 2:00 - 3:30 Session 7
- 3:45 - 4:15 Session 8
- 4:30 - 6:00 Session 9
Wednesday
- 9:00 - 10:30 Session 10
- 10:45 - 12:15 Session 11
- 12:15 - 2:00 Lunch
- 2:00 - 3:30 Session 1
- 3:45 - 4:15 Session 2
- 4:30 - 6:00 Session 3
And so on to Friday afternoon at 5:00 or so. Probably (maybe) sessions 8, 9 & 10 would/might be sparsely attended on Friday. They were WELL attended on Friday for ORF 2008 - probably because we kept the Big Gun until the last session. :-) But maybe we could drop out some sessions (9 & 10) and do a wrap-up right before or after Lunch on Friday. Even with the dropouts, we would have 16 sessions, 8 per track. Depends on how many really good talks we get scheduled.
Well, there you have it. The first agendum on the table is the Agenda schedule for the Conference. :-)
SDG
jco
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