Recap of 2nd Organizational ORF 2009 Meeting

Greetings:

MUCH better reception and participation this time thanks to Carole Ann. Here is a brief recap of what went on in case you missed it.

Location for this year will be Dallas and we will begin scheduling and promoting the Nice (or Southern France) location for 2010. This year we "probably" will return to the Sheraton and try to arrange for a quieter place for "Pub Nights" rather than a noisy bar that we had last year.

The dates will be the last week in October in order to allow European attendees to schedule one airfare for two conferences.

Monday will be tutorials ($100 - $200 extra charge) taught by various independent consultants thereby keeping it a vendor-neutral zone. Conference will begin on Tuesday morning and finish up on Friday noon. There will be either a 30 minute Q&A morning and evening of the speakers OR just one, one-hour Q&A each day as the final hour. (One session each day sounds good to me.)

Conference fee for attendees will be $500 with a $400 early sign up if done by August 15th. No charge for speakers. Each vendor/sponsor will be allowed two (and two only) attendees but will have a sliding scale reduced fee schedule for their "special" customers and attendees.

Meeting rooms will be one large room for main conference and a smaller room (about 1/2 of last year's meeting room) for Sponsor's booths where they can present their material and demos. Coffee and tea will be in the Sponsor room only to reduce congestion in the main room and allow time for Sponsors to meet with attendees. Bring your own bagels, cookies and/or donuts.

Presentations probably will be spaced so that we have one 30 minute break in the morning, about 2 hours for lunch, and one 30 minute break in the afternoons. If any Sponsor wishes we can arrange for an evening social hour with drinks for a nominal fee. There will be a map of available restaurants in the area from high-dollarup-scale places to quick-food mall-food-court places. All will be within a two-hour time frame to allow everyone to return in time for the afternoon sessions. (Let's face it, hotel food at these events is really terrible. A Big Mac and fries wold be much better.)

Diamond and Platinum vendor promotions will be on beer steins, T-Shirts, back packs, etc.

Presentations will be technical with the focus on applications; meaning, "How do you do..." Perhaps one on cyber security, another on bank loans, another on fraud detection, another on rule-based forecasting, another on transportation, another on constraint based programming, etc. However, these will be from the implementation point-of-view that explains in detail (without revealing intellectual property) showing code wherever possible and NOT a marketing presentation. Others will be on HOW to write a rulebase but not necessarily how to implement the Rete Algorithm. Hopefully Dr. Forgy will present something with more detail on parallel rulebased design and/or Edson Tirelli will explain parallel CEP implementation inside the rulebase.

At this time we have several committed speakers: Dr. Charles Forgy, Gary Riley, Jason Morris, James Owen, Larry Terrel, Greg Barton, Rolando Hernandez and Dr. Jacob Feldman.

Potentially, other speakers will be Carole Ann Berioz-Matignon (FIC), Edson Tirelli (Drools), Carlos Seranno-Morales (FIC), Daniel Selman (IBM/ILOG), Clive Spenser (LPA), Don Tallo (FIC), Dr. Ernest Friedman-Hill (Jess), Paul Haley (Haley Systems => Haley AI), Dr. Pedram Abrari, Paul Vincent (Tibco). John Zachman would be good. What we need are some folks from other disciplines such as RBF, CBP, etc. to add to our diversity. So far we still don't have active participation from Pega, Mind Box and other companies. It would be nice to have one theory presentation each day but that's just me talking.

Abstracts are due April 15th. The completed white paper (suitable for printing in a conference proceeding) is due June 30th. Slide presentations in PDF or PPT are due August 30th. Our Go/NoGo date is mid to late August.

So, that's it for now. Next organizational meeting (if there is one) will be in about two weeks. Comment on this blog unless you are an approved blogger for this space and then blog your thoughts. If you want to be a blogger, just send me an email and we'll set you up.

SDG
jco