If you didn’t know that, surprise! You can see all the sessions proposed so far, and even subscribe to the feed to see new proposals as they’re submitted.

By the way, the deadline to submit a proposal is coming soon, April 10, and this time, we mean it.

Did you know that each proposal also has its own comments section?

So, as the deadline approaches, if you’re attending (thanks) or on the fence, have a look at what’s been proposed and let us know what you’d like to see presented in June (specifically, June 17-19). Keep in mind, this isn’t voting, but if we have a couple sessions that we can’t decide between, a comment or two may help sway our decision.

After all, if you don’t know what you want, we’ll just pick what we want.

The comments are between you and us, so feel free to tell us how awesome your favorite presenters are without blushing.

Head over to the proposals and have a look. There are more than 150 in there, broken into five tracks: cooking, chemistry, culture, hacks and business. Browse through and comment where you find something interesting.

Why stop there? If you’re really passionate, why not blog about it and get a comment-storm going? We’ll be reviewing proposals after the submission deadline, so you’ll have time to get organized.

Of course, if you find that the session you really want to see isn’t in there yet, never fear. You still have until April 10 to propose it yourself or find the right person to present it and convince her/him to submit it.

What do you think of the open proposal model? It’s not that common for a conference to open its proposal submissions for anyone to see, and we think this is an integral part of having a great conference.

So, this is your chance to let us know what you want to see.

What are you waiting for, an invitation? No problem.

You are cordially invited to review our proposal submissions and comment on those you find interesting.

After which, you are invited to register for our conference, and if you’re staying overnight here in the Rose City, may I humbly suggest you stay at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower using our conference rate.

Can’t wait to see you in June.

When we had our very first planning meeting for the conference, we made a big list of everything we wanted to cover (with colorful commentary—sorry, we were pretty excited).

Our initial conference content outline

In the course of the discussion, we realized that if every topic we were excited about had its own track, we would have way too many of them to manage. Also, it would go against one of our core principles: we want to bring people together, not shuffle them off into separate rooms. So we decided to take a different tack, and group the content around how we approach it, not what the underlying technology is.

That’s how we ended up splitting the most technology-heavy topics into three tracks: Cooking, Chemistry, and Hacks. I think they make the most sense if viewed as a group. We learn what to do via cooking, following recipes until we’re able to improvise our own. We learn why it works by studying the chemistry, which lets us see what’s happening at lower levels. Finally, we rewrite the rules by hacking. This isn’t a linear progression; we may jump from one approach to another frequently in the course of our work.

The other two tracks round out the picture. Business is about how we earn a living. Culture is all of the other things we do around our work, like organizing user groups, managing projects, and applying the open source ethos to other areas of our lives.

We arranged these five tracks to cover the full scope of our open source existence. Within them, there’s plenty of room to talk about individual languages and tools, even at the advanced level, but sharing with people from a range of backgrounds. We can all learn much from each other.

Hopefully, this provides a better frame of reference for our tracks. (And now you’ve got even more reason to submit your own proposal.)