ADASS is often referred to as “A gathering of old friends, rather than a
scientific conference”. This statement is generally used as a way to articulate
the sentiment that the members of the ADASS community are, on average,
friendly and easily accessible and why ADASS is generally a very nice meeting
to attend. However, being a gathering of old friends can make it hard for
newcomers, without existing connections in the community, to be fully included.
To make the community more accessible for junior staff members and other
newcomers, we propose to organise a free-flowing BoF session, following the
simple rule that newcomers should be stimulated to discuss any relevant topic
with each other and/or the established members of our community. We en-
vision those topics to range from, for instance, ways to navigating the work
floor, how to pitch more modern programming languages, or how to engage in
collaborations.
To give the novice attenders an idea of what ADASS is, we propose 3 vet-
erans giving a pitch for about 5min about the history and their own personal
experience to kick-start discussions and/or fill an online board with questions
they can answer.