Anyway

This is not going to be a XML 2004 Con­fer­ence wrap-up, for sev­eral reas­ons. Mostly because other people have writ­ten about the con­fer­ence and the ses­sions they went to, partly because I didn’t man­age to make it to very many ses­sions myself, and partly because it’s really far too late. The lead-up to the con­fer­ence is always very intense, the week itself is even more so, and it takes some time before I can col­lect my thoughts suf­fi­ciently to write a post­ing. I have a few ideas stacked up; this one made it to the top first.

A few people asked me ques­tions about the con­fer­ence so I figured I may as well answer them here, for pos­ter­ity, or for gen­eral interest. Hence the OAQ. Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions are answered on the con­fer­ence web site; Occa­sion­ally Asked Ques­tions can be answered on the chair’s blog. By the way, the answers may or may not apply to the XML Con­fer­ence in any year that I wasn’t or won’t be chair, i.e., any past or future chair may have dif­fer­ent ideas on how things should work.

Do you sell key­note slots?

Some con­fer­ences do sell key­note slots (usu­ally by guar­an­tee­ing a key­note slot to any com­pany that spon­sors the con­fer­ence) but the XML Con­fer­ence (at least while I’m chair­ing) doesn’t. Com­pan­ies that do get key­notes some­times decide to spon­sor the con­fer­ence, but that’s their decision.

So how do you pick key­note speakers?

There are two cat­egor­ies of key­note speak­ers — inter­est­ing people, prefer­ably with a new or fresh per­spect­ive, and people who rep­res­ent com­pan­ies where the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee thinks that con­fer­ence attendees will be inter­ested in the vis­ion that com­pany has for some part of the XML industry. Some­times we’re lucky and a speaker falls into both categories!

What guar­an­teed speak­ing slots do spon­sor com­pan­ies get?

Spon­sor com­pan­ies up until XML 2004 were guar­an­teed a product present­a­tion slot where they could talk about their products. For all other talks, they need to go through the same pro­ced­ure as every­body else and be judged on the qual­ity of the abstract, how well it fits into the pro­gram, and how good the speaker is.

“up until XML 2004″? What does that mean?

There’s always the pos­sib­il­ity that so many com­pan­ies will offer to spon­sor in any given year that guar­an­tee­ing a product present­a­tion slot will no longer be pos­sible. I still have no inten­tion of guar­an­tee­ing any com­pany, whether spon­sor or not, a speak­ing slot that isn’t a product present­a­tion slot. Every­one has to earn their slot!

What is a product present­a­tion slot anyway?

A product present­a­tion slot is a 45-minute talk that is freed from the con­straint of not talk­ing about products that all other talks need to fol­low. The idea is that often people really do want to know about products and fea­tures in a present­a­tion set­ting, where someone has time to go through import­ant fea­tures. Product present­a­tions are selec­ted dif­fer­ently to other talks; exhib­it­ors on the show floor have pref­er­ence, talks that show­case products from more than one vendor work­ing together have pref­er­ence, and products that are based on stand­ards have pref­er­ence. The product talks are in a spe­cial track, so attendees know what they’ll be getting.

Some people do show products in the other talks, what’s with that?

Tech­nical work is often best illus­trated by show­ing a demo. As long as the demo con­cen­trates on the tech­nical aspects of what’s being talked about, and not about whatever cool fea­tures the product has, it still qual­i­fies as a non-product talk. This is a fine line that some people man­age well and oth­ers don’t, which is why ses­sion chairs are pre­pared to stop any talk that goes too far into product demon­stra­tion ter­rit­ory when it isn’t meant to.

I’ve noticed lots of product tutori­als though — what about those?

The Plan­ning Com­mit­tee dis­cussed this one quite a lot. We decided that there is room for tutori­als on how to use products as long as the products are reas­on­ably pop­u­lar, and the tutorial is clearly labelled as being about product X from Com­pany Y. This ensures that poten­tial attendees know what they are pay­ing for. If they don’t want a product tutorial, they don’t go to it.