Summer of XML

One of my cur­rent pro­jects is as Course Dir­ect­or for the revamped XML Sum­mer School in Oxford, Eng­land. John Chel­som asked me to help out and I was only too happy to say yes; I have many fond memor­ies from pre­vi­ous years. It will be more a late-sum­mer school this year, being from Septem­ber 20–25, but that does free up more of the sum­mer prop­er for oth­er things, not to men­tion giv­ing us more time to fig­ure out the sched­ule and speakers. 

Anoth­er advant­age of late sum­mer for the XML Sum­mer School is that it does­n’t clash with Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal, Canada, which is on August 11–14 (with the sym­posi­um on pro­cessing XML effi­ciently on the 10th). Papers for that are due on April 24, so you don’t have much time to get them in if you’re plan­ning on speak­ing. Any markup-related top­ic is wel­come, as long as it is of suf­fi­cient qual­ity and depth.

It’s inter­est­ing com­par­ing the two — Bal­is­age is a geek’s con­fer­ence, unapo­lo­get­ic­ally aimed at people who are think deeply about the issues, even if they’re not apply­ing them at work. The XML Sum­mer School is more like train­ing, aimed at less expert prac­ti­tion­ers of and new­comers to XML, and more likely to be atten­ded by people who want to go back to work the next week and apply what they’ve learned dir­ectly. A few of the speak­ers are the same, of course, and the dis­cus­sions over din­ner tend to veer in some of the same directions. 

And, of course, both con­fer­ences are on Twit­ter; Bal­is­age at http://twitter.com/Balisage and the XML Sum­mer School at http://twitter.com/xmlsummerschool.