Plop Conference

The international conferences on Pattern Languages of Programs (a.k.a. PLoP) is held in the late summer or early fall at Allerton House, a conference facility run by the University of Illinois.

PLoP employs the Writers Workshop as a means of developing the pattern form.

Main PLoP Conference Page:

hillside.net

The newest addition to the PLoP conferences is PLoP '08 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

Moved from PlopTwoThousand

Most notable quote: Brian Foote, "Watching a great musician play an acoustic guitar is like watching Michael Jordan play baseball."

Moved from BetterShepherding

Have ideas on how to improve the PLoP shepherding process? We're collecting ideas here. At Euro Plop this year, we decided it would be a good idea to gather concerns and ideas in one place and to get some dialogue going. Neil Harrison has agreed to have a look at these and see what can be done to prop up shepherding across the conferences, and AlanOCallaghan (who was one of the EuroPLoP chairs this year) also committed to taking some action on this item.

Christa Schwanninger, 29.08.2002:

The organizers of Euro Plop started some measures at last and this year's Euro Plop, which are:

- offering a shepherding workshop for "old" and "new" shepherds at the conference

- asking sheep for feedback on the shepherding they got

Problems still are:

1) finding shepherds who are domain experts in the sheep's domain of expertise

2) nobody can be forced to attend a shepherding workshop

3) shepherds invest their spare time, there are never enough of them and we have to be very grateful that somebody does this job: we mustn't offend them

Possible solutions could be:

1) getting support from domain experts who are not involved in patterns otherwise

2) better advertising for the shepherding workshops, make sure that they are viewed as offer for "old" shepherds, too

3) find ways how to motivate the shepherds to improve their shepherding?

Nora Koch, 30.08.2002:

4) trying to reduce the time shepherds dedicate to comment trivial things (everybody should know); let him concentrate on important ones.

5) submitting "better" papers, at least in the form and the structure. Submitted papers should be fulfill a set of basic "rules" (of course these rules must have be defined. (Here we have a new problem: Who can define these "rules" or recommendations?)

There's another problem with that idea, too. You are assuming that the already overworked PLoP chair and program committee will have to read all of the papers to decide whether or not they meet the basic rules. Good grief, I would never have finished anything had I had to do that this year... -- Kyle Brown

Can someone explain what shepherding is, in this context?

Or "PLoP," for that matter?

Sigh. My how far Wiki has drifted from its roots... OK, PLoP stands for Pattern Languages Of Programs, which is a conference series that started with the original Plop Conference in the U.S. (we will be having the 8th such conference (Plop Two Thousand Two) this coming September) and now includes conferences such as Euro Plop in Germany, Sugar Loaf Plop in Brazil, and Koala Plop down under in Australia. The PLoP's are different from other conferences in that there is not a "program committee" who reads and rejects and accepts papers on the first pass. Instead, there is a process called Shepherding, which assigns an experienced author to work with the author of a pattern or pattern language for a length of time (usually around two months) to work together on the paper and suggest improvements. At the end of the period, the shepherd gets a vote (together with a program committee member) as to whether or not the paper should be accepted for workshopping at the conference. -- Kyle Brown