Today CppCon announced information about the evening sessions -- and, if you read closely, about early-daytime sessions.

This next bit is important: All CppCon Mon-Thu 8:30-10:00pm evening sessions and all Tue-Fri 8:00-8:45am sessions are free and open to everyone -- free to attend, and to propose and even lead a session whether or not you're registered for the daytime CppCon program. If you are reading this then you're interested in C++, so if you also live locally in the Seattle area then go fire up your calendar now block off all these evenings (and early mornings!) and come on by before and after work and join in the fun! You will learn a lot and enjoy a lot. And if you're attending CppCon but only there for a one- or two-day registration, that means you're still in town and should still plan to attend all these free events for every evening (and early morning) you're there -- if you don't, you're missing a great opportunity and a great part of your visit to CppCon.

From author and committee panels to lightning talks and hackathons and more, you won't want to miss the CppCon night life. This conference does not end at 5:30. Plan to be there again at 8:30pm every night Mon-Thu, and at 8:00am Tue-Fri. It's free as in air.

Here's the link:

CppCon 2014 Open Content

by Boris Kolpackov

And the announcement:

Each evening the conference activities will break for dinner from 5:45 to 8:30, giving you time to head out and enjoy a meal with fellow attendees. But after eating, don’t head back for a boring night in your hotel room -- come back to the venue for another 90 minutes of learning and networking!

Monday through Thursday from 8:30 pm to 10 pm is the evening program. Looser and less structured than the daytime program, it’s designed to get you engaged and give you opportunities that traditional sessions can’t offer. In our six rooms, one will hold a single “conference planned” session that spans the full 90 minutes, and the other five will hold open content, two 45-minute sessions per room. There will also be open content in all 6 rooms from 8:00am to 8:45 Tuesday through Friday.

The “conference planned” sessions are Meet the Authors Monday, Lightning Talks Tuesday, Grill the Committee Wednesday and Conference Planning Thursday. More details on each of these will be coming shortly.

Open content is just that, open! Attendees and speakers alike can propose sessions on anything that interests them. These might be a single facilitator leading a room through an exercise, activity or demo, a panel of 3-5 people taking questions from the room and answering them, a “hackathon” on a specific project, or an open conversation among the whole room. The projector is available (possibly to take collaborative notes, possibly to display content related to the exercise; typical slide presentations are not the best fit for open content sessions.)

Many of these “Birds of a Feather” talks will be proposed on site as the conference progresses. A speaker who gets a lot of post-talk questions may agree to host a Q&A session in the open content time. An attendee inspired by a session may host a session to explore a topic further or start on a group implementation of something. Some can be proposed in advance and with 64 slots to fill, our job will be easier if many of them are. To propose a session, simply email open-content@cppcon.org and tell us who you are and what you want a session about. If you have time constraints such as “after a specific session” or “not on the same day as a specific session” let us know in the email. (For example, someone who will be grilled at Grill The Committee Wednesday can’t do an open session Wednesday evening.)

These sessions will be open in another way too -- evening content does not require conference registration. That’s right, everyone who is in the area is welcome to come and join us for all the evening sessions, including to propose or lead a session. This is part of our goal to be an inclusive conference for the entire C++ community.

Attendees will be able to express their interest in these sessions in advance, enabling us to schedule them and to select the most popular if we have more submissions than slots. More details on that will follow soon. For now, please email your submissions as soon as you can so that our planning work can get underway. See you in Bellevue!