As the Asterisk project has grown, the complexity of deployments has increased, and the number of solutions surrounding the project has exploded in quantity.  Each year, the process of choosing what talks to put in AstriCon has become more difficult, and we have seen a wealth of topics that seem to focus more and more on the very large issues surrounding deployment of Asterisk.  Architectural concepts, scaling methods, and integration with various other tools have become a theme.  This is due to the Asterisk project maturing – no longer is this just a developer conference; it’s now a conference for developers and integrators, decision-makers, resellers, consultants, vendors, to name just a few of the categories of attendees.  The topics have become broader as the deployment of Asterisk has become broader, and the complexity of some of the implementations cannot be delved into at a detailed level in just ~35 minutes, so we have lost some of the rough edges that have characterized AstriCon in years past when it was populated entirely by code-hackers and dialplan gurus.  However, perhaps we have swung a bit too far towards the more high-level talks, and it’s time to do a slight course correction back into where the community wants us to go.

Quite a few people talked to me after the show last year and lamented the lack of some of the more fundamentally technical talks – the talks where there is a set of dialplan instructions up on the screen, where the audience is scrolling through their own configs during the talk trying to put together some version of what the speaker is discussing.   I agree with that assessment – we had great talks last year, but we did have a lower quantity of “bare metal” talks than the previous year (though still quite a few!)

Knowing that we have this desire by the community to get back to the technical basis for the conference, we’ve arranged the tracks this year to more clearly address functional concepts instead of business concepts.  The addition of “Asterisk Fundamentals” as a track is in response to the community request to get back to the basics of why many people come to AstriCon – they come to learn.  The learning that is done at AstriCon always impresses me – the chance to talk informally with so many people who are doing amazing things is the biggest reason to make it to the show.  But the content of the tracks is the most structured way of distributing knowledge.  Of course we still have a big place in our heart for the talks centered around business concepts such as Case Studies (which are often a great mix of business and technical) as well as the wide-ranging topics that will appear in the “Platform Solutions” track, but we’re hoping we can fine-tune our mix of technical talks and not-as-technical talks to make things even more valuable to the variety of attendees that will make their way to Washington DC in October (26-28).

Our track area for AstriCon 2010 are:

Asterisk Essentials – This track is focused on the specifics of how you’ve implemented some feature in Asterisk that is somewhat “self-contained”, meaning that you solved the problem with Asterisk and a minimum of external tools.  Typically these will be fairly tightly focused talks around some specific method or technique you have used in your system.  The focus here is on “how” – the ideal talk will reference dialplan samples, configuration files, system configuration details, and package names.  If you evaluated several ways to solve a problem, let’s hear about it!  What did you try that didn’t work?  Imagine you’re trying to convince someone to use Asterisk instead of a closed-source product to solve some particular problem – tell the audience how you achieved your goal, and how easy or hard it was to get to completion.  Examples, examples, examples!  The audience wants to see your configurations, no matter how eccentric your development style.

Case Studies - More broad than the “Asterisk Essentials” track, this lineup of talks will discuss some of the business issues around using Asterisk as well as the implementations.  What was the problem set your business faced?  What did your business use to justify the implementation of Asterisk?  What communications methods are you using?  How did you configure Asterisk to provide the best value for your user community?  Savings, ease-of-use, feature sets – any aspect of your use of Asterisk as to how it relates to your deployment is interesting to the audience, many of whom will discover entirely new concepts of how to use Asterisk from your examples.

Third-Party Add-Ons – Each year at AstriCon, there is visible a significant expansion of the ecosystem surrounding and connecting to Asterisk.  A large amount of the value of Asterisk comes from its integration into add-on packages from both the commercial and open-source markets, and this track is focused on those elements which work in conjunction with Asterisk.  As with the “Asterisk Essentials” track, it would be ideal if your talk focused on not just the general concepts of your add-on, but in fact went into the very specific details of how to configure the application for some specific goal.  Providing the audience with concrete examples of how your add-on works is vitally important – without seeing screen shots, and perhaps “live” demonstrations of how the system performs it is often difficult to understand the benefits enough to come away from a talk with a strong desire to implement your add-on.  Demonstrate, educate, and excite the audience with the programs you’ve connected to Asterisk!

Platform Solutions – The telecommunications space is not simply programs and hardware; it is the joining of people, equipment, and development in a way that enhances the communications experience for end users.  What is your experience in selling Asterisk-based platform solutions into your market sector, and what can you share with the audience on how to be more successful?  Are you creating a hybrid GSM/Asterisk platform?  What is the latest in mobile device integration with Asterisk?  Have you built a conferencing solution that handles video?  Is your open-source telephony/screen-sharing/calendaring program using Asterisk?  Describe your wide-ranging and complex solutions to the audience.

Do you have a talk topic that doesn’t quite fit one of these areas?  Submit it anyway – there is always room for adjustment in our schedule, and we will always find a way for a good talk to make it into the line-up.

Please send your talk proposals to us!  We’re very interested in hearing what you want to speak on, and we want this year to be another successful year of learning for speakers and participants.

Talk topic proposal form:  http://www.bit.ly/speak-astricon2010