This year, EclipseCon is set to take place in Ludwigsburg, Germany, from October 16 to 19, 2023. This year’s conference is already shaping up to be a must-attend event for the entire community. With a new program chair and significant changes to the tracks, EclipseCon 2023 promises to be an exciting and engaging event. 
To kick things off, I spoke with Miro Spönemann, our new committee chair about EclipseCon 2023 and the call for proposals:
This is your first year as chair of the program committee, what are you most excited about?
Shaping the general direction of the conference. I’ve been involved with the Eclipse Foundation’s communities for about ten years and I always felt that EclipseCon has an important influence on the liveliness of these communities.
What’s particularly interesting for me is getting the right balance between focus topics of the Eclipse Working Groups versus outside viewpoints. I tend to be on the progressive side and am personally attracted to modern web technologies. But at the same time I’d like to honor the efforts of our working groups as well as the long-term commitment of our successful projects.
This year we have six tracks, rather than the eight to ten we’ve had in previous years? Why the change?
At this stage of the conference, the purpose of the tracks is to describe the focus topics for talk proposal submissions. During the discussions with the program committee, we felt that the previous track descriptions were too long so we reduced the number of tracks and condensed their presentation. As a result, some of the tracks have become broader and more general, and I like that.
For example, the new “Tools & IDEs” track is summarized as this:
Innovations, updates, or exciting applications of frameworks for building IDEs, tools, and modeling environments.
Of course a lot of things can fit into this general description. I’d really like to see submissions from related Eclipse projects, e.g. Theia, Sprotty and other projects that I’ve been involved with in the recent years, as well as innovations that are happening outside of the Eclipse IDE, e.g. new Rust-based IDEs.
What is the program committee looking for in talks this year?
I’d like to see real innovation. When will we move beyond what has already been there? How can we connect with other communities and widen our perspectives?
The committee is intentionally composed of quite different people, and each will contribute their unique point of view. Where we definitely all agree on is that we look for convincing talk descriptions with a sufficiently large target audience. What does “convincing” mean?
- Show us the essence of your talk – some details of the expected contents, but keep it concise.
- Be creative – use your sense of humor, boldness or other means to show how you’ll attract the audience.
Are there any other features you, and the rest of the committee, are excited about?
I appreciate the return of the tutorials. They are a great way to bring in-depth content to the conference and add a deeper quality of learning to the event.
Submissions are now open for EclipseCon 2023
Submit your proposal by June 16, 2023 for your chance to speak at this year’s event.
