If you follow Delphi news, you probably know DevCo is hosting a Developer Conference next falls in the San Francisco Bay Area. As usual, potential speakers were invited to submit topics for their talks. Differently from the past, the panel in charge of the conference program has asked the community to vote for your 10 favorite topics. Voting taks place here. Notice you can both rate submissions and vote them, although it is not clear if rating will matter.

As you can see, I submitted many ideas (on topics I already covered in the past and brand new ones) you can find in page 2: Delphi OOP Foundations, Directions in Delphi and AJAX, Object/Relational Mapping (using InstantObjects and NHibernate), The Fun Side of Delphi, Compact Framework Applications with Delphi for .NET, Web Services in Delphi, XSL on Steroids, XML in Delphi, Delphi Open Tools API, VCL for .NET, Evolution of the Delphi Language, Web 2.0 AJAX Development in Delphi, Delphi Dynamic Architectures with Packages, and Delphi Design Patterns and Idioms.

Voting ends on August 21st , but so far it seems that very few votes have been given. By random sampling of the 202 entries, it looks that very few talks got more than 10 votes. Out of my talks, the most voted is the Fun Side, that got 14 votes at this time (and 19 ratings) -- the highest vote I could found by my random samplings! I also noted that someone (a not-so-fair would-be speaker?) has taken the time to rate with low marks most of the submissions (some talks with one or two ratings have very low marks, despite their value). This makes rating almost useless.

With the limited interest voting has got so far, I guess the entire idea (which sounded good, despite my speakers fears for low marks) didn't work out very well. I hope this doens't imply a limited interest in the conference, which I'm sure will be much better than most recent ones. Anyway, I don't know if I'll be speaking (the panel will meet and decide, then I'll have to turn in a good enough paper) and on which topics. You can still vote to shape the content, I guess. And (particuarly if you live in Europe) you can come to my European DevCo Conference talks in Frankfurt in September.