This year at the PLoP 2002 conference, we've decided to add a new wrinkle to deal with some of the concerns that have been raised about the quality of feedback given to the authors at previous PLoP conferences.

One of the concerns expressed about the writer's circle format of previous PLoP conferences is that while they are effective in providing comments on improving the form and style of the patterns papers workshopped, they are less effective at providing valid and helpful feedback on the content of the papers. To begin to address this concern, this year we are fostering cooperation among domain experts by allowing for the submission of "Focus topics" in special areas where we will seek for paper submissions. 

In the past, we have seen groups of papers submitted in areas of particular interest to the patterns community, for instance, Analysis patterns, telecommunications patterns and J2EE patterns. We have also found that the strongest pattern languages that have emerged are those that are formed from the combined experience of several experts in a field. 

The focus topics accepted for this year are:

	* PatternsAndPatternLanguagesForDistributedRealTimeAndEmbeddedSystemsFocusTopic
	* DesignPatternsForTestingConcurrentApplicationsFocusTopic
	* PatternsForSecuringEnterpriseApplicationsFocusTopic
	* PatternsOfMessagingAndWebServicesFocusTopic

If you are interested in submitting a paper on one of these topics, and would like to find a collaborator, or to find someone who can help review your patterns prior to the submission deadline (and thus improve your chances of having your paper accepted) then please click on the appropriate link and leave a note asking for help.

After the paper submission deadline, we will also provide a list of all the authors who have submitted papers on the focus topics to each other, and encourage them to contact each other to continue interacting and collaborating prior to the conference.

Furthermore, we will keep those authors that have submitted papers on a particular Focus Topic together in a writer's circle during the conference, and provide additional time for Focus Topic authors to begin collaborating outside of the writer's circle workshops. We will also encourage the members of the Focus topic groups to read and comment on the papers for the topic prior to the conference, thus making it possible to more substantively improve the papers during the conference.

KyleBrown