Patterns Conferences - What Are the Writer's Workshops?

PLOP stands for Pattern Languages of Programming and they got initiated in the early 1990s. The key events at those conferences are the writers' workshops. After submitting your paper, you're assigned an experienced patterns author who gives you very, very, very detailed feedback on the pattern. As a consequence, after patterns have gone through such a writer's workshop, they're usually much better than their original submission.