Introduction: Experience Reports

I love stories. I love hearing them; I love telling them. Stories connect me to ideas in a way that dry recitals of facts and findings never could. Perhaps it’s my love of stories that makes the experience reports track my favorite at conferences. A great experience report is a story: a personal account of what somebody experienced while trying an idea. Of course, there’s more to an experience report than a story. Experience reports are grounded in facts. They’re reported by people working on real projects under real constraints. Their stories tell us what they tried, what worked out... and what didn’t. If experience is the best teacher, then perhaps these reports are the second-best teacher. We have an excellent program this year. We received nearly 100 proposals. Whittling the proposals down to the final 30 reports was a grueling process. Our 16-person review committee didn’t just read every proposal; we personally conducted a phone interview with the primary author of every proposal. Once the papers were accepted, each paper was our experienced reviewers.