===

Hi. This message is being sent on behalf of me, Brian Marick. I'm
trying to reach the person named above, and you might be able to
help. Here's the deal:

OOPSLA is one of the larger academic software conferences. The program
chair for 2005, Richard P. Gabriel, wants to shake things up. As part
of that he's going to institute an Essays track (described below), and
I'm program chair for that track.

I want a big chunk of the committee to be good thinkers, well known,
lovers of change, experienced in raiding other disciplines for ideas,
and quirky enough that what I'm doing with this email will be
amusingly attractive (or at least bemusing). 

What *am* I doing with this email? This sort of people - any sort of
people, really - are not best reached by email out of the blue from
someone they don't know. They're better reached by people they know.

Unfortunately, I don't know the person named above. So I'm doing that
old "N degrees of separation" thing, where I'm asking you to send
this email along to some *one* person who you think is both more
likely than you to know the Person Named Above and will also think
the idea of the Essays track is interesting enough to forward it on.

If you know the Person Named Above, please contact me at
<marick@exampler.com> to arrange an introduction. I'm hoping they can
be persuaded to serve, and especially hoping they'll get some value
out of it.

Thank you!

=== 

The Essays Track:

The essays don't have to be original research, the usual OOPSLA
fare. Instead, they'll be of two types.

- One type is "the first draft of your Turing Award lecture". The
  Turing Award is the highest honor in computer science. Like the
  Nobel, it comes with the obligation to produce a speech, usually of
  the sweeping nature expected from an elder in the field. We're
  looking for essays of that sort: a survey of breadth and experience,
  telling the field something about itself, making tacit assumptions
  and habits explicit.

- Essays from outsiders who are deeply experienced in a different
  field, have some knowledge of ours, and can come to us and say,
  "It's so odd that you do X, because we in field Y do that sort of
  thing completely differently". These essays should shake us out of
  our ruts.

Logistics: Papers are due March 25, 2005. I don't know how many there
will be, because this is a new track. In the past, reviewers have
gotten 15-30 papers. I assume our track will have many fewer. The
program committee will meet on April 29th. However, I'm the only
person who's required to go, which is good because ACM (the sponsor)
is too stingy to pay for air fare. The typical paper review is a page
long. Normally, reviews can be farmed out to graduate students (or
other "trusted co-reviewers"), but I'd like to avoid that for this
track.