I was looking through the Agile 2011 submissions and I noticed something. A lot of them are pretty interesting, well thought out ideas. I do not envy the chairs of the various stages their task. They are going to have to make tough decisions about which good talks to include in the conference and who they tell "great idea but there's just no time."
It occurred to me that one mitigation for this might be if conferences like this started soliciting papers from the talks that didn't make it and collected them into a book (or collection of booklets). That way, all the neat ideas that didn't make the cut could still find their way out into the world. If done right, the conference could make a little profit off of coordinating their release.
