Winter is coming, but we can’t feel the chill. Hyperledger Global Forum 2020 is keeping us busy and excited. Arizona’s calling, as is Camelback Mountain for those of us who hike. But enough about location, let’s talk about the content!
In a recent post, we shared the process of selecting the talks. Now it is time to tell you about the content. To keep it simple, we didn’t create multiple tracks. The job was to select 21 technical talks, 21 business talks, 18 product demos, and 8 workshops. Only 23% acceptance rate! That is harsh. On the other hand, we were very excited to see proposals from more than 40 different companies as well as a good representation of universities, governments and non-profit organizations.
The Program Committee, led by Tracy Kuhrt from Accenture and Hart Montgomery from Fujitsu, did the hard work and made the hard calls. They spent considerable time discussing the submissions and choosing the talks that were not only ranked highest but also came from new or under-represented voices in our community. The discussions were quite intense: many people were passionate about a different area.
Most of our Program Committee members are experienced reviewers for other industry and academic conferences. To make sure that we were all on the same page, guidelines on general CFP scoring guidelines and best practices were published as part of the CFP progress and the program committee developed the criteria we talked about in the previous post.
To make our program clear and easy to follow we created five tracks: Keynotes, Technical, Business, Demos and Workshops. We wanted to balance it out so that attendees wouldn’t have to choose between talks on going at the same time.
Of course, no agenda is finalized without keynotes and so we are really excited to share with you the confirmed ones. We will hear from Sheila Warren, head of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger at World Economic Forum; “Blockchain Revolution” co-author Don Tapscot and our Governing Board chair, Robert Palatnick.
In addition to these keynotes, we have a great line-up of talks. In the technical track, Alfonso De la Rocha Gómez-Arevalillo from Telefonica will talk about “Going into Production! Performance Best Practices in Hyperledger Fabric,” Swetha Repakula from IBM and Tracy Kuhrt from Accenture will tell us about building diverse ecosystems in their presentation “All Are Welcome Here: Creating an Inclusive Hyperledger Community” and Nathan George, representing Sovrin Foundation, will present on “Standards and Interoperability for Identity.”
In the business track, there will be quite a few case studies including ones by Julie Esser from CULedger and Ron Amstutz from Desert Financial Credit Union, Alan Krassowski from Kiva and John Jordan representing Government of British Columbia. We wanted to talk about collaboration, so you will find many talks on Hyperledger Besu and connections with the Ethereum community, including a panel “Competition, Collaboration, and Connection: How Hyperledger & Ethereum Communities Thrive.”
Did we succeed? Probably not – we can always do better! That’s why we are sharing the agenda with you so early. If you think we missed something or feel like it is not balanced enough, drop us a line at hgf@hyperledger.org. See you in Arizona!
