Writers’ workshops are used by the pattern community to improve our patterns and other manuscripts. These workshops are the primary focus of our time at PLoP and in them we discuss accepted papers. Authors are assigned to a writers’ workshop and are expected to attend all sessions in that workshop. All other conference attendees are encouraged to attend one or more writers’ workshop sessions, preferably choosing to read and review papers where they can contribute. Paper assignments to workshops are posted before the conference.

The format of writers’ workshops has been adapted from the creative writing community. Each writers’ workshop contains a handful of papers, which authors must read before the conference to be able to give each other feedback on their work in a peer review session of around one hour per paper. Richard Gabriel has written both a book and a pattern language on writers’ workshops. The pattern language is a good place to start.

Each writers’ workshop is led by a moderator. In each session, the author or authors of the paper under discussion remain (mostly) silent while the others discuss it and explain insights and views they have about it. Depending on the workshop’s moderation style, authors may be brought into the discussion to gain insight and clarity about their work. From these sessions, authors get a lot of feedback and many suggestions about how they can improve their work.