Anyway

Enough acronyms for now — the Call for Speak­ers for North­ern­Voice 2007 is open! North­ern Voice is Vancouver’s blog­ging con­fer­ence, focus­sing on per­sonal blog­ging. This means talks on how to solve some company’s PR prob­lems are not really in scope, though tips on how to run a per­sonal blog when you’re also an exec­ut­ive at a well-known com­pany would be. We’re doing the two-day ver­sion again, where Moose­Camp is an “uncon­fer­ence” on Fri­day Feb­ru­ary 23rd, 2007, and the con­fer­ence proper is on Sat­urday Feb­ru­ary 24th, 2007.

In pre­vi­ous years we’ve held the con­fer­ence down­town in Van­couver, but we couldn’t get the space we wanted this year. So we’re going out to the UBC main cam­pus, way out west in Van­couver, about as far west as you can go without fall­ing off into the Geor­gia Strait (note, it’s still in Van­couver proper, south of the Lions Gate bridge). Cyp­rien man­aged to get us space in the Forestry Sci­ences Centre (pho­tos) so we can have all the space we need for talks and the self-organized child­care. I think this will be a fun con­fer­ence, par­tic­u­larly as I’m not plan­ning on being any­where else the week before. Last year I was jet­lagged, hav­ing got back from a trip to Rome the night before, and I still had a good time at the conference.

Other mem­bers of the organ­ising com­mit­tee have blogged it already: Boris, Brian, Dar­ren, and Kris all have their takes on what’s import­ant about this conference.

At the selec­tion meet­ing I’ll be look­ing for pro­posed talks that cover one or more of the groups of people we’ll have in the audi­ence. As a side-note, please don’t just say you can talk about any­thing. That really doesn’t help us fig­ure out who should talk on what — if you have an idea and we think a vari­ant of it would work bet­ter, don’t worry, we won’t be shy in ask­ing you to change focus a bit! I expect we’ll have fewer new­comers to blog­ging, although we will have some of those; to make up for it I expect we’ll have a cer­tain num­ber of people who feel they’ve already said everything that they can say and want to some tips on keep­ing up the excite­ment and interest in what they’re blog­ging. We’ll have some people who want tips on how to incor­por­ate pho­tos, video, or audio bet­ter, and some who still aren’t sure what style sheets are all about. In your speaker sub­mis­sion, tell us who you’re aim­ing at and what know­ledge they need (or don’t); this will help us fig­ure out how to put everything together. This is a fun and edu­ca­tional con­fer­ence and good speak­ers are part of that, so please put a bit of time into those sub­mis­sions to make it easier for us to pick out the good speak­ers! The dead­line is Novem­ber 28th, and this is a real dead­line. Please do use the form and don’t just send us email as we want to make sure we don’t over­look any sug­ges­ted talks, or lose them in somebody’s over-eager spam fil­ter. Oh, and by the way, let us know of talks you’d like to see, even if you don’t want to give them.