Proponent's Manual

This manual has the goal of guiding lecture proponents to correctly fill in their proposals for a papers-managed event, making reviews easier and increasing acceptance chances. This is a generalized version of the original document written for fisl7.0? .

Submitting the proposal

General recomendations for filling the proposals.

Fill in carefully your personal information

Don't assume that the reviewers know you. Inform an consisten minicurriculum, so the reviewers can judge your experience on your proposal(s) subject(s). Moreover, do it in the more objective possible way. Specially, try to highlight your contributions to free software, be they technical (code, translation, documentation, etc) or not.

Indicating your personal homepage's URL in the suitable field, or some URL that indicates your free software-related activities in the comments fiels will be of great help for you.

On each proposal, it's interesting if you include in the "comments" field what kind of involvement you have with the proposal's subject.

Fill in carefully the "Description" field.

In this field, try to describe with details what would be the lecture's approach. It's not needed (or possible) to send any files (slides, etc). Describe the presentation's contents with as much details as you can.

Altogether with your minicuriculum, this is going to be the only information source about your lecture for the reviewers. Description not well written are strong candidates to a bad review.

Tips:

• Try to include URL's for projects cited in the proposal, unless they're obvious (GNU, Mozilla, OpenOffice.Org, etc).
• Always indicate the cited softwares' licenses. Remeber that we're making a free software event.
• aleays indicate links and/or small descriptions of terms and abbreviations that aren't of general knowledge.

Fill in carefully the "Abstract" field.

As is written in the form, this field will be used in the event's advertising material, which includes the event's program. This way, try to be at the same time short and clear about what is going to be shown in the lecture.

Keep yourself inside the limit of 50 words.

Choose the right track

To review each track, we'll invite reviewers that are specialists in each area. If your lecture is in an unappropriated track, it's probable that it receives a bad review. For example: lectures with strong and specialized techinical content probably won't get good reviews in the track "Free Community, Philosophy and Culture".

Evaluated items

The following items are evaluated in your proposal, in which the reviewer indicates one options among "None", "Small", "Some", "Much" and "Extreme":

• Relevance: how much that proposal is relevant to the event.
• Quality: Qualitative distinction of this proposal in the subject.
• Author(s) Experience: got from the provided information.

Reviewers are oriented to not look for information regarding proponents os their proposals in other places than the event's proposal submitting system. It's the author's responsibility to show clearly and objectively the above items.

After that the reviwer will emit his/her decision based on the subject and his impressions about the proposal.

Reviews results

Receiving news about your proposal

The only way of communication between the program comitee and proponents will be e-mail. This way, certify yourself that e-mail come from the address advesrtised in the conference's call for paper arrives correctly to you, and read them.

About the reviews

The only opportunity for giving information about the lecture proposal is in it's submission. So, certify yourself that all information that highlight the relevance of your proposal are available before the review.

Classification and reviewers' comments won't be revisited If you consider some some comment as inappropriate, just ignore it. Don't contact the organization to complain or make considerations about reviwers' comments.

About the evaluation criteria

After the reviwers to their work, lectures selection is mathematic and automatic. Don't contact the organization in the case your lecture is not selected: reviews won't be revisited. Beyond that point only objective criteria will be applied.

-- AntonioTerceiro - 05 Feb 2006