At 06:07 PM 8/17/00 -0700, Stan Sieler wrote:
>I was curious about something, so I grabbed the first conference proceedings
>that came to hand (1988 Orlando), and counted:
>
>192 talks by non-HP employees
>  87 talks by HP employees
>   ? SIG/BOF meetings (not listed in the proceedings, so I don't know the
> number)
>---
>279+
>
>For comparison, the approximate total of all events at HP WORLD 2000
>(i.e., the number of "<LI>"s on
>http://www.interex.org/conference/hpworld2000/agendadetail.html)
>is 312 (this includes separately paid-for activities on Saturday and Sunday).
>
>Thus, they're apparently comparable size conferences, as far as programming
>goes.

The last several years the tendency has been for more tutorial-type
presentations (1 hr 50 min) vs the standard 50-minute presentation.
So sometimes comparison of conferences based upon count could be
misleading in terms of the amount of time of the conference.  From
a conference scheduling perspective, we look at how many separate rooms
we have over the number of hours a day earmarked for talks to
deliver program content.  Something around ~300 hours for the main
conference program this year I believe.  This does not include the
keynotes, plenary, seminars and perhaps not all the SIGs/BOFs as well.


>Of course, nearly every talk at Orlando was MPE oriented :)

And it was a real good conference.  It certainly is interesting how
things have changed over the last 12 years....