Welcome to the EuroPLoP blog!

This is the first time EuroPLoP (maybe any plop?) has had a pre-conference blog. So why have we decided to try it now?

The original suggestion came from Klaus Marquardt and we – the conference chairs, i.e. Till and myself – liked the idea so here we are. The blog is an experiment, we don’t know if it will work but its worth a try. Personally I hope the blog will achieve several things:

• Create more of a pre-conference conversation between the organizers, the attendees and the rest of the world. This might encourage a few more people to come to EuroPLoP, and it might also help explain EuroPLoP – and all PLoPs in general – to a wider audience.
  
• Keep people better informed about how the conference is coming together and what they can expect.
  
• Open up the conference and demystify it for those who know nothing about it.
  
• Promote patterns in general.
  

So what can you expect from this blog?

I don’t know how often we’ll post, at the moment it is Till, Michael and myself. We might open it up to some others from the conference organizing committee – the program committee or just PC – in future.

This year we are adding thematic tracks to EuroPLoP as another experiment. As soon as we have decided which tracks we are accepting and who the track chairs are we will encourage them to add something here,

We don’t know how often posts will appear. One of us will try and post when something interesting happens. There will probably be plenty of postings about deadlines, events and papers as we go.

I expect there might be some discussion of patterns too.

We’ll see.

Finally, can I please encourage readers to leave comments and ask questions. We can only address questions or change things if we know what people are thinking, so please, please, please, leave comments!