We are looking into an end of February date to do the next week long Boot Camp, location to be decided - proposals for USA so far are Chicago, Austin and Miami. The EMEA one will be Berlin, probably overlapping with the 2011 JudCon.

The last boot camp had a medical focus and was a huge success. We have more budget this year so hoping to build on that.

We are thinking of doing a Monday optional 1 day pre-conference "basics" day, to avoid repeating the "what is a process, what is a rule, what is an event" type talks. This also means we don't bore returning people with repeated content and that everyone there has the basics.

Then follow up with 2 days of applied industry talks split into "vertical tracks". Because of the high level of interest and success last time, we will run a dedicated 2 day Medical/Healthcare track again. Whether we run dedicated or mixed tracks for other verticals depends on interest and people's willingness to present or organise and lead other verticals. I imagine initially we'd probably do mini tracks, say half a day per vertical. Some target verticals would be telecoms, commercial finance (trading), consumer finance (mortgage/insurance/loans), logistics.

The 4^th day would then be an organised workshop day. We'll provide bootable USB keys for all in attendance, so that we have a quick start off (previously we wasted hours getting everyone up and running with virtual images). The workshops will allow people to go through the very basic examples or the more advanced examples and infrastructure set-up with us on hand. Those that have their own projects and just want to work on that with us on hand to offer help can do so too.

The 5^th day will be more of an open floor. Some people will leave early, others will want to continue working through the basic examples and making sure they can configure and set everything up. Others will want dedicated discussion time to work on their own problems and ideas. In general it's the day where the developers will be on hand for what ever anyone wants – you'll get out of it what you put in.

If you would like to present or even run and organise a vertical let me know. In the past I've found for a vertical to work it needs a well connected industry person to chair it, so we definitely need community people to take up the mantle here. Talks can either be "What we did with Drools and/or jBPM" or "This is an industry problem use case that could be solved with Drools and/or jBPM" or just something that we think will be of interest to the audience. The range of technologies covers (but not limited too) rules (expert systems and other derivatives domains), workflow, event processing and ontologies.

The event will again be free for attendance. We are thinking of opening it up for sponsorship to help towards food and drink.

So if you are interested in talking, organising, sponsoring or just have some general input then let us know - we want to progress in moving these events to a more industry focus and not pure technology, for that to happen we need YOU the community.

Mark