Anyway

I’m in the middle of last-minute details for the XML Con­fer­ence 2004, things like check­ing the PDF of the sched­ule before it gets sent to the print­er, fig­ur­ing out the chair­ing sched­ule for the ses­sions, etc. There’s a lot more to run­ning a con­fer­ence of this size and com­plex­ity than I thought before I got involved. Once the con­fer­ence starts a lot of the work has been done. I ima­gine the dir­ect­or of a stage play must feel the same when it finally opens to the pub­lic. You’ve done a lot of pre­par­a­tion work, and now it’s up to the act­ors (in the case of the con­fer­ence, the speak­ers) to do their part. And if one of them fluffs their lines or turns out to have stage fright, that’s as much part of the exper­i­ence as those speak­ers who have a gift for com­mu­nic­at­ing with the audi­ence that is a joy to see.

There are so many dif­fer­ent types of con­fer­ence, ran­ging from the tech­nic­al more form­al bent of the XML con­fer­ence, com­plete with pro­ceed­ings papers and (new this year!) a prize for the best speak­er, to the delib­er­ately inform­al nature of the North­ern Voice blog­ging con­fer­ence. The lat­ter is aimed at per­son­al uses of blog­ging rather than cor­por­ate, there are no exhib­its and a min­im­al entry fee. (BTW, the dead­line for speak­er sub­mis­sions to North­ern Voice is Novem­ber 15 at Speak­er Inform­a­tion.) And then there’s the FOO camp, which I’ve writ­ten about before.

What makes a con­fer­ence worth­while is always the speak­ers, I’ve decided. Speak­ers who care about what they’re talk­ing about and want you to care. Speak­ers who know what they’re talk­ing about is a nice bonus, of course ;-). At the XML Con­fer­ence I’ve found that speak­ers who are asked to speak are gen­er­ally less motiv­ated and do a worse job than those who have the motiv­a­tion to put in the abstracts them­selves. If you care about some­thing, you will put in the work to do a good job, and this applies to speak­ing as much as to writ­ing code.

I’m look­ing for­ward to both these con­fer­ences, Novem­ber for XML, and Feb­ru­ary for blog­ging. They’re dif­fer­ent in style, and they will have dif­fer­ent audi­ences. But they will both have some great speakers.