Programme

The conference starts on Wednesday evening and goes until Sunday morning. Please plan to arrive Wednesday afternoon or evening. The first evening of the conference with the welcome reception is a treat -- if you arrived only Thursday morning you'd be missing out on something. Likewise, everyone should participate in the closing session and the dinner on Saturday; therefore please plan to stay until Sunday morning. Accommodation for 4 nights is included in the conference fee.

If you haven't been to EuroPLoP™ before, there's an introduction before the actual opening session in which you can learn about the history of EuroPLoP, its goals, perspectives, rituals, and how it's different from other conferences.

Several writers' workshops will take place in parallel, with 7 to 8 sessions each. If you have a paper at the conference you'll join the writers' workshop to which your paper is assigned. If you don't have a paper you are free to choose a writers' workshop as you like, but please stay with this workshop over the entire conference. Paper assignments to workshops will be posted in June.

Participating in a writers' workshop requires that you have read the papers of that workshop and, if possible, that you took some notes on what you liked about the papers and what you felt needed improvement -- just as a memory aid for yourself. This is the precondition for a fruitful discussion. However, there's no reading time during the writers' workshops, and experience shows that, for the remaining time during the conference, chatting with others or meeting people in the bar is much more fun than sitting in your room alone reading papers. So do yourself a favor and read the papers of your writers' workshop in advance.

There are 3 long focus groups and 3 short focus groups, with 4 resp. 2 sessions over the conference. You can choose one long focus group and one short focus group. Remember that these events typically require some kind of preparation, so please check with the session description when you decide which session you'd like to attend.

If you have never written a pattern but would like to take some first steps, the writing group will be of interest for you. 3 sessions over the conference will give you a good introduction into pattern writing.

If you work as a shepherd or would like to be a shepherd in the future, please join the shepherding workshop (also 3 sessions).

Please also take a look at the description of the workshop types, the papers, the focus group description, and of course, once it's mid May 2003, don't forget to register!

After the official part of the conference ends on Sunday, Hillside Europe will meet. The Hillside Group was formed by people who came together in writers workshops in order to facilitate the patterns movement. The PLoP conferences were the brainchild of the Hillside Group which also oversaw the publication of four volumes of software patterns in the Pattern Languages of Program Design (PLOPD) series published by Addison Wesley. Last year Hillside Europe was founded as an independent sister organization to the Hillside Group to both promote and support the growing patterns' movement in Europe. Incidentally, as an attendee at EuroPLoP which is funded by Hillside Europe you are entitled to membership.

Another important thing: there is no dress code at EuroPLoP. You can wear a suite and a tie, but be prepared to feel a little overdressed.