Guidelines for Authors

There will be many more high-quality abstracts submitted than can be accepted, making the work of the program committee particularly difficult. Abstracts must thus be detailed enough to provide the committee with the information necessary to make an informed decision.

There are many excellent paper proposals, and judging them is hard work. Some authors do themselves and their audience a disservice by not sending in a submission with the right details to properly judge them.

Conference committee members want to choose papers that will attract and entertain an audience, and develop the conference in the right direction. Usually the number of submitted papers is two or three times the number of possible slots at the conference.

Unlike some other conferences, we require only an abstract to be submitted with the proposal. This possibly makes the work of selecting presenters harder, but it saves people writing a whole paper and having it knocked back. This makes it possible to submit an idea without too much effort for the author, but is also a challenge to present or "advertise" the proposal to the committee.

Here are some ideas that might help if you want to get a paper up. Obviously mileage will vary depending on the conference and the particular committee.

Detail

Give enough detail. Some people sent in just a few sentences giving a very broad description of the technology or a project they were going to speak about. When there are so many more proposals than spaces these ones fall on the first fence.

The abstract ought to hint at enough technical detail to pique the interest of the review, and to show that you really know more about the topic than can be gleaned from Freshmeat.

Include links! Allow the reviewer to drill down to discover more about the technical material, or about your background or experience. Hopefully the reviewer will find the project's web site so interesting that they really want to hear more about it. This can also help establish your credentials as a presenter (showing previous papers/slides/etc), or your association with the project.

Background

Indicate your public speaking experience. The selection committee members ought to be able to tell from a good abstract whether the material will be interesting, but that says nothing about whether you are a good speaker or not. It is sad but true that somebody with an impenetrable accent or mumble probably will not be enjoyed by the audience.

Obviously, as in everything else, be honest: if you do not have much experience it will not rule you out, everybody has to start somewhere. Talking at LUGs or university presentations helps your resumee and gets some practice.

Focus on your own original work. New material is more interesting to attendees. Not only do authors make more interesting speakers, but it also supports the purpose of encouraging developers. Make sure that your bio explains your connection to the topic.

Type of Presentation

If it ought to be a tutorial, or BoF (birds-of-a-feather) session, then say so, do not try to squeeze it into a paper. An overview of how to use a particular established tool is worth having, but it probably is not so appropriate for a paper at Linux technical conference. Perhaps the reviewers might suggest "better as a tutorial?", but it helps if you try to apply for the right category in the first place.

Understand, that there are several potential forms of participation at LinuxTag:

The Free Conference is the main event focussing on technical and other advances in the field of Linux and Free Software. You should be directly involved in the project if you are going to present, or be an long term expert or user. State clearly your relationship to your topic. If you presented this or a similar topic at other conferences or if your wrote an article or even a book about it, say so. To have a presentation in the Free Conference, you have to participate in the official Call For Papers for the Free Conference. A Program Committee will review all submission and select the set of papers for the conference.
The Practical Linux Forum is dedicated to important Linux standard topics and is targetted to new or migrating users or just people who want to get a job done. This audience is not interested in all nitty gritty details but in a rock-solid presentation. If you work as a trainer, give classes at your company or university or have a very good overview in a field of general interest, this is your event. You need excellent verbal skills and should be familiar in teaching in some way. The Call for Papers applies also for this category.
Tutorials cover a topic a lot more in-depth, usually over a half or a whole day. We accept only directly involved project members as tutorial presenters as we want to provide the highest possible quality in this type of event. Tutorial presenters will be appointed directly by the Conference team, but suggestions via email are always welcome.
The Business and Public Administration Congress is directed to decision makers from companies and governmental administration. Presentations focus more on organizational and procedural questions, how to manage and maintain big installations, on business models and case study reports. Presenters at the Business and Public Administration Congress are directly appointed by a distinct Program Committee. The teams of the Free Conference and the Business Congress stay in close touch of each other and exchange proposals if suitable, though. Submitting a paper in the official CfP may thus result in an invitation for the Business Congress, however there is no guarantee and no formal way to apply.
More informal topics can be discussed in Workshops and during BoFs. They can be even requested on short notice if time and space permits. Slots are assigned on a first come, first served basis. Be prepared to advertise for your slot on your own. It is also possible to have a closed meeting for a specific project or a group that will not be announced publically. You can apply for a workshop by email.
Unlike all other events the Company Presentations and Vendor Sub Conferences may explicitly focus on a specific product or service. These slots are paid by the presenting companies. Naming your affiliation, your sponsor or employer during talks other to the Company Presentations is perfectly ok, however presentations with the sole purpose of advertising a single product or service is definitely not.

Selection Criteria

There are a number of formal criterial that have to be met in the first place. We need sufficient information about you and your contactdata including a picture. To ask for such information after a paper is accepted is a very strenous task for the organizers. We hate to say that, but these formal criteria are the first tier in the selection process. This also applies to a number of terms and conditions we require you to accept beforehand. They include the right to publish your submission, deal with accomodation and can be looked up in full detail in the Call for Papers.

Next our Program Committee (PC) reviews all proposals regarding several criteria. The PC is a group of well known authorities of the Linux and Free Software community, often former LinuxTag presenters. They get appointed by the LinuxTag Program Chair and Co-Chairs. The Program Chair is a Member of the Board of the LinuxTag e. V.

The three most important criteria for the PC are

relevance and originality,
competence and background, and
presentation style.

Although a presented topic does not need to be genuinly new, it usually helps. Another important aspect is that the topic should be of high interest. If it is only of interest for a specific group of people like software developers, disabled people or speakers of a native language, say so in your abstract.

Please tell us about your background and how you are involved into the topic you are proposing to talk about. A lot of people tell us about their first computers and how long they do with Linux. However, it is much more of interest in which software projects you participated, how long you did that and with which role.

Your background and experience may help the PC to estimate your presentation skills, but it is not mandatory to have a long reference list of given talks at every possible occasion. However, adhering to the formal rules as described by the CfP and in the virtual Conference Center (vCC) where you enter your submission, is crucial. Use the language you are most familiar with and use it correctly. Try to write in full sentences instead of fragmented keywords. Use a perspective and a scope that can be printed without too much editing for official programs and the website. Keep in mind that the abstract is your advertisment for your talk.

Therefore the last stage of the selection process relates the single abstracts in a panel group to each other. We try our best to prepare an interesting program that looks also at a single topic from different angles.

We have made provisions to communicate with authors during the selection process. However, please do not be disappointed that we cannot discuss every single aspect of every proposal we receive. We try our very best to give every author at least some lines of feedback. If you do not receive such feedback feel, free to ask us directly.

Scope

We cover all Linux and Free Software related topics, in contrast to other conferences which focus only on the kernel, GNOME or KDE. We have to admit that the the name of the game is a little bit misleading: LinuxTag (which means something like Linux-Convention as "tagen" means "having a convention" in German) also includes also all kinds of BSD Derivates and other software that is not necessarily directly connected with Linux like Apache or PHP.

So topic matter is a funny question: some papers are about somewhat topics that for a general Linux audience are a bit esoteric, like fingerprint recognition or kernel driver specifics. Perhaps this means less audience members will actually go away and actually use the technology, but on the other hand it makes it novel and interesting. Other proposals look at internal aspects of the kernel or some other software package, and again people might be interested to know about it even if they will probably deal with this topic directly ever. Basically the point is to make it clear that the material is novel but also relevant or at least interesting to attendees.

Potentially successful projects are more interesting. Sometimes you see projects that are technically sound, but that have no real plan for how they will be widely accepted. Perhaps it is a needless reimplementation of something that already works pretty well. Perhaps it is a design that works on the author's machine and they have given no thought to how it would ever be put into a distribution, or used by other people. While this may not be worthless, but it is not going to score as highly, because it neglects important software engineering aspects and other principles of common sense.