Welcome back, gentle reader. When I last left you, we were just heading into round 2 of CFP for this year’s Australian Cyber Conference. I had hoped that my words might spur a jump in the quality of submissions we received for round 2. To be fair, I’d say over all there were fewer submissions which were obviously lazy and/or half arsed, but in general there was still a lot of room for improvement. So, here I am again, venting my frustrationoffering some constructive advice about how to write a CFP submission that has the best chance of being accepted…

I made this post on Linkedin earlier this year, when the blog was still collecting ether-dust. I decided to publish it here because it was very well recieved, mostly by people who are on other conference committees and review boards. It’s not my intention to discourage anyone from submitting a talk to a conference, quite the opposite in fact. Conference organisers want lots of submissions, but they need them to be good. Hopefully this will help some of you who are thinking about it hit the mark.

TL;DR: Be clear, be concise, be qualified.

So yeah, it’s been a while since I last posted to this blog. Quite a while in fact. What happened? How did the thing with speed cameras go? If you’re hoping for some sort of fantastic story about how I was rendered to some nameless island in Indonesia by the government for exposing their evil plans, I’m afraid this time there isn’t one. The truth is I just got bored. As the court case receeded further into the past it became less interesting to think about, and I just didn’t feel like writing the rest down. With the series unfinished however, I also didn’t feel like I could to move onto new topics, so I just let the thing rot…

If you’ve been waiting all these years to hear the thrilling conclusion, the short version is that I lost. The laws are written in a way that makes them almost impossible to challenge, and the real lawyer I was up against dismantled all my arguements (though it at least took him longer than he was expecting). I avoided having to pay their costs on a technicality, but they made it pretty clear that if I tried a similar thing again I probably wouldn’t be so lucky.

Anyway, I finally feel like enough time has passed that I can revive this blog. I also really like this domain and I feel bad leaving it to rot. So, expect some new content. I can’t make any promises about how long it’ll be until I get bored again, but until then, buckle up and get ready for some rants.

In the process of making my application to force disclosure under the Criminal Procedure Act, I did a lot of reading to try and get my head around the legal technicalities of what I was trying to do. It was during this research that I first began to get a feel for how draconian a piece of legislation the Road Safety Act is. As I read through the various sections which were relevant to my charge, it became increasingly clear that the Act had been written very deliberately to place motorists at a distinct disadvantage when legally contesting any charges against them, with the obvious but unstated intention of discouraging people from even bothering.

My education on the ins and outs of the Victorian criminal justice system began with the Criminal Procedure Act. Included with my charge sheet were some instructions on how I could ge more information from the informant about the charge, in my case a police officer from the Traffic Camera Office. Following these instructions, I sent the officer in question an email with my list of things I wanted him to provide.