Talk:5th WICSA 2005

From WICSA Conference Wiki

Ad hoc Discussion Areas

Here are links to discussion pages that conference participants have initiated on specific topics. Be encouraged to chime in:

1. How does software architecture and reverse engineering relate?
2. Design decision discussions
   1. Why Architecture Isnt Just Design Decisions... and its Talk page
   2. Why Design Decisions Trancend a Particular Architecture
   3. Decisions Considered... another response
3. Some WICSA reactions
4. SPQR notes
5. Reflections on papers
6. Practitioners interested in participating in case-studies and similar research

Note: Clicking the " " link above next to the "edit" will create a new talk section on this page.

Thoughts for Wiki Improvement

For those who have actively participated in the Wiki aspect of the conference, whether through editing or just viewing the contents, we would like to express our hearty Thank You! Considering that this is a first full-scale attempt for WICSA, we hope that the integration of Wiki with the overall conference has been, at the minimum, useful. At the same time, we do recognize that there is room for improvement before the Wiki could be considered a seamless integration with the conference. As is often the case, it is not so much the technology, but the human factors that matter more.

I would like to get feedback on both fronts, with the common underlying goal of improving the integration of Wiki usage with the bulk of the conferencne activities. In your feedback, please be concrete and constructive, with an eye toward pointing out specific transitions that could be taken to accomplish the particular improvements of states. Specific questions that might trigger some thoughts:

• How can we make the Wiki site more usable?
• How can the organization of the Wiki pages be improved for easier navigation, search, and content contribution?
• How can we encourage more active use of the Wiki site... did having a Wiki Kiosk help at all?
• How can we make sure contents from all the sessions are captured?

Let me start off with some items that I've observed warrant some improvements:

• More integrated account creation
  • Account creation probably could be better integrated with the conference registration process.
• Better content organization and provision
  • Apparently, even given the current layout of the main WICSA 5 page, it was still hard to find certain content, in particular paper-session relations, conference program-specific information. Generally, the missing elements are usually "relation"-type information. I'm not entirely certain how to improve this, but indexed would help, and perhaps multiple instances of the same information would also help (with the caveat of consistency maintenance).
  • Conference logistics information (location, time, etc.) could also be better integrated into the Wiki site early on. The realization to provide more complete info came only during the conference itself.
• Better and quicker wiki help information
  • I didn't realize what people would have trouble with when it came to using the site, so some of the help information came later than perhaps would have been useful, including general guidelines for contributing content, example walk-thru to contribute such, and guidelines for uploading files.
  • What other usage problems have people encountered?
  • How can I make the help information easier to find, more concise and quicker to read?
• More complete capture of session discussions
  • We really appreciate the help of volunteer Wiki coaches, who did a superb job capturing discussion notes in the working sessions.
  • How can we expand this to encompass all sessions of the conference?
  • Would finding ad hoc scribes help?
  • Is it realistic to hope that people who wrote down notes for personal use would be willing to contribute those?

Please chime in with your input. Thank you!

Hint: Click the " " next to the "edit" link at the top of the page.  :-)

Shang-Wen Cheng 12:59, 10 November 2005 (EST)

Statistics

Out of the 80 papers submitted 15 (19%) were accepted as full papers and another 42 (53%) were accepted as working session papers, totalling 57 (71%) accepted papers.
Source: WICSA Conference opening