Year: 2005

The final sched­ule is up on the XML 2005 web site and I think it’s the best yet (maybe I say that every year, but there are some really good talks on the pro­gram this year). We have big com­pan­ies talk­ing about what they’re doing, small com­pan­ies talk­ing about new tech­no­lo­gies, and inde­pend­ent people talk­ing about what they’re cook­ing up in their base­ments or gar­ages. There are talks for the new­comers to XML, talks for the cyn­ics, and talks for those in between, so take a look!

And of course the tutori­als are avail­able for regis­tra­tion; I’d urge every­one who is inter­ested in attend­ing a tutori­al to register as soon as pos­sible. If we don’t get enough regis­trants for some tutori­als we need to can­cel them, which is dis­ap­point­ing for the con­fer­ence, and the tutori­al presenter, and espe­cially for people who wanted to attend the tutori­al but did­n’t register in time. You don’t need to attend the con­fer­ence to attend a tutori­al; we try to be flex­ible to meet attendees’ needs (per­son­ally I think you should, of course, but every­one has dif­fer­ent ideas as to what they want to do in any giv­en year).

There are also more ways to take part in the con­fer­ence: every registered con­fer­ence attendee, as well as registered booth staff, can put up a poster (or two). Posters can be on any (reas­on­able) sub­ject; posters on new product ideas, new tech­no­logy ideas, form­ing groups to work on either of the above, advert­ising your avail­ab­il­ity for full-time hire, or advert­ising your con­sult­ing ser­vices are all wel­come. The poster dead­line for guar­an­teed space is Novem­ber 4; space may be avail­able at the con­fer­ence as well, but that’s not guaranteed.

We also have an art­work exhib­it each year to show how tech­no­logy and artistry are not mutu­ally exclus­ive; any ideas are wel­come. These pieces are shown next to the pieces in the exhib­it hall, so any­one can admire your work, wheth­er signed or anonym­ous. Dead­line to guar­an­tee space is Octo­ber 28; there may be space avail­able later as well.

It’s going to be a fun and inter­est­ing con­fer­ence again this year, I can just tell!

Shel­ley’s post­ing Maids, Mom­mies, and Mis­tresses made me decide to throw in my own few cents on what makes a good con­fer­ence sub­mis­sion, and how talks are accep­ted, to add to what Kathy Sierra and Adam Trachten­burg said (and there are good points in both). I’ve chaired a con­fer­ence since 2001, organ­ized tracks, and been a speak­er at vari­ous con­fer­ences for many years, so I know some­thing about the subject.

Num­ber 1 has to be: if there are guidelines, read them and act on them! The con­fer­ence organ­izers wrote them for a reas­on. I’m always amazed how many people obvi­ously don’t read the ones I have for XML 2005 at Abstract Writ­ing Hints — we get abstracts that are two sen­tences long, with mis­spellings, and acronyms used wrongly. The review­ers uncere­meni­ously dump all of these.

I’ve been involved in lots of con­fer­ences and they range from the peer-reviewed to the “people we know or who pay get pref­er­ence”; you need to fig­ure out which con­fer­ence you want to speak at and why, and which sys­tem they use, and how to have your talk accep­ted in that sys­tem. If the inform­a­tion isn’t on the con­fer­ence web site about how talks are selec­ted, email someone from the organ­iz­ing com­mit­tee and ask! Or find the name of a speak­er from the pre­vi­ous year and ask them — most people don’t mind a brief polite email ask­ing how they got on the program. 

At the XML 2005 Con­fer­ence I chair we use a blind peer review pro­cess to grade the abstracts. The Plan­ning Com­mit­tee then takes those grades and looks for pro­gram bal­ance to cov­er inter­est­ing top­ics, know­ing who the speak­ers are. This sort of sys­tem means that if you write a good abstract on an inter­est­ing top­ic, that isn’t topped by an even bet­ter abstract on a related top­ic, you’ll find your­self on the pro­gram. (Key­notes are a dif­fer­ent story, of course, they’re invited). Most of the speak­ers each year are new speak­ers; some are “per­en­ni­als” but that’s because they are involved in inter­est­ing work and know how to describe it in ways that make the review­ers want to attend the talk. The blind review sys­tem is biased towards sub­mit­ters who can explain what they’re doing and why it’s inter­est­ing in 500 words or less, but I fig­ure that’s a reas­on­able indic­at­or for being a good speak­er as well. It does­n’t always work that way (and we col­lect attendee reviews of the speak­ers each year to catch those cases), but usu­ally it does. Oh, and anoth­er thing — it’s so much easi­er to have 100+ people help us fig­ure out which talks are good than to rely on only 7 people on a Plan­ning Committee! 

The final piece of advice I’d give, once your talk is accep­ted, is to prac­tise, if you’re not an exper­i­enced speak­er. Even bet­ter, record your talk (audio and video) and watch the video to fig­ure out what you can do bet­ter. Prac­tise to your­self, the cat, or your fam­ily. Doing some pro­fes­sion­al train­ing is good, but being famil­i­ar with the mater­i­al so you’re not talk­ing to the pro­jec­ted slides, or your notes, is bet­ter. Being pre­pared for likely ques­tions is also good, and hav­ing a couple of “pro­posed” ques­tions to give the chair of your ses­sion should nobody in the audi­ence have ques­tions nev­er hurts. In oth­er words, be prepared!

So I’m up to my eye­balls in pro­ceed­ings papers for XML 2005 which is one end of the con­fer­ence spec­trum in terms of form­al­ity, work for the chair and the plan­ning com­mit­tee, and degree to which things must be organ­ised, when along comes the remind­er that the web site is up for North­ern Voice 2006. North­ern Voice is proof that there are cer­tain con­fer­ence con­cepts that don’t need a high degree of form­al­ity, in fact the concept of per­son­al blog­ging is, I think, dia­met­ric­ally opposed to too much form­al­ity, so as a mem­ber of the organ­ising group (plan­ning com­mit­tee seems a bit, ah, form­al a term) I’ve always been on the side of “keep it simple, keep it informal”. 

Last year’s event was a lot of fun and people seemed to really enjoy them­selves. So this year we’re put­ting a Moose Camp on the day before the con­fer­ence itself, where people can organ­ise them­selves into groups to dis­cuss whatever they want to dis­cuss that’s related in some way to per­son­al blog­ging. Dead­line for speak­er sub­mis­sions (we need to have some form­al­ity!) is Novem­ber 16, Moose camp is on Feb­ru­ary 10, the con­fer­ence is on Feb­ru­ary 11 and all the oth­er dates are on the web site. Yes, we still have the moose logo, although the col­ours are dif­fer­ent. Yes, we’re plan­ning on hav­ing more t‑shirts next year. No, we don’t yet know who the key­note speak­ers will be. Maybe we won’t have key­note speak­ers, we’ll fig­ure that out when we see the speak­er sub­mis­sions and see what sort of pro­gram we can build. Hope to see you there!