“The time has come, the walrus said” — not to talk of cabbages and kings, nor even of sealing wax, but to move on and let someone else with fresh ideas take over chairing the XML Conference Series. XML 2001 was the first conference I chaired, XML 2005 the last. It’s been an interesting journey, full of interesting people and interesting topics. I’ll miss many aspects of chairing — the positive side of interacting with attendees, reviewers, session chairs, and speakers, but I am relieved I no longer have to plan my entire year around one week in November, clean dozens of XML papers (well, once this year’s final proceedings are done), or worry about how many last-minute cancellations or no-shows we’ll have (e.g., this year, for some reason we had a large number of cancellations so I was glad I had a formal waitlist of speakers and talks).
When I took the job, I set out to make a conference that I would want to attend and contribute to. To me, the key was community involvement. A conference is only as good as the speakers allow it to be; you need knowledgable speakers talking on interesting topics if you’re to give attendees a reason to bother attending. How do you get good speakers to attend? You make sure there are lots of other good speakers attending, so they can all talk and learn and network. The ideal conference to my mind is quiet during sessions, noisy during coffee breaks, and everyone goes away exhausted but exhilarated from everything they’ve seen, heard, and thought about. Including the community in this process was key, and I was fortunate in that so many people in the XML community were happy to help out, whether as planning committee members, reviewers, speakers, or session chairs.
I set up a planning committee to help with final decisions, and designed a peer review system that was easy for the reviewers (give a grade from 1 to 4 and add comments) so people wouldn’t mind reviewing. One reviewer said it was just like reading a schedule and deciding which talks he’d bother attending, which I liked. The reviewers made the planning committee’s work in picking the final set of talks for the schedule possible. Many of the reviewers were happy to be session chairs for the conference itself, helping out speakers (particularly new speakers), moderating questions, and, to my mind, underscoring the fact that this is a community conference. I don’t really like conferences that don’t have session moderators or chairs as it seems impersonal somehow.
And then there were the smaller touches I could bring in as chair. For example, many conferences hand out speaker gifts, which are usually small, semi-useless tech toys that die after 3 uses. I decided that personally I’d rather have a speaker/reviewer reception to attend, so that’s what we did. And I started the XML Cup to recognise people whose contributions seemed to cry out for more recognition; again, this was intended as something for the community.
My reward has been conferences where people are involved, where the hallways are quiet during sessions and the coffee breaks busy, where attendees come up and say “my management told me to attend and it’s been really great!”, where ideas and techniques cross-pollinate from one field to another. This year it became particularly obvious that we couldn’t pigeon-hole talks any more, they were all applicable to multiple tracks and had applications far outside the uses of XML even 3 years ago. XML is truly a basic part of today’s IT infrastructure in ways that few would have been brave enough to predict when I started chairing these conferences. And I like to think that at least some of that is due to this conference: kernels of ideas that are passed around, networking, and the incubation effect of having lots of experts in close proximity who can bounce ideas and crazy thoughts off each other.
David Megginson will be chairing XML 2006 (Nov 13–17, 2006, in Seattle). He’ll do a good job and will bring fresh ideas and energy to the conference. It will be interesting for me to sit back and watch how it develops!