Summer in Oxford

 Conference, Travel  1 Response »
Jun 272007
 

Most years I get to speak at the XML Sum­mer School put on by CSW in late July in Oxford, Eng­land. Last year I did­n’t go since I’d just had a baby 6 weeks before and the fam­ily suc­ceeded in talk­ing me out of it. This year I’m going again. It should be a lot of fun; the idea of the school is to get a bunch of experts as teach­ers who go along with the attendees to all the social events, so the attendees can ask ques­tions while every­one is in the pub or wan­der­ing around the Old Bodlei­an Lib­rary. Ques­tions while punt­ing are best not dir­ec­ted at the punter, of course, and the rest of us are usu­ally too busy laugh­ing anyway.

With ses­sions on web ser­vices (includ­ing iden­tity and secur­ity), con­tent and know­ledge with XML, XSLT, XSL-FO and XQuery, Teach Your­self Onto­logy (that one’s new this year!), Build­ing XML Applic­a­tions, and XML in Health­care, there’s lots to choose from. I’ll have to choose which days I attend care­fully, there’s always too much going on.

I’m speak­ing in the Trends and Tran­si­ents track (which I chair each year, even when I’m not there) with Jeni Ten­nison and Dan Con­nolly; I’m talk­ing about Web 2.0 while they’re talk­ing XML Pro­cessing and Micro­formats respect­ively. I even got my present­a­tion deck fin­ished, and only a couple of days late! For the last ses­sion of the day, I get the oth­er track chairs to spend five minutes telling us what they think are this year’s hyped or under-appre­ci­ated tech­no­lo­gies, fol­lowed by a pan­el ses­sion of all the day’s speak­ers. There is always some con­tro­versy around people’s opin­ions, even of these sup­posedly dry tech­nic­al sub­jects. For a sample, check out the You­Tube video of Bob DuCh­arme’s talk (rant?) last year (the video and sound qual­ity’s not great, but adequate).

CSW is offer­ing a spe­cial deal this year, speak­ers get a spe­cial code that people can use for a dis­count on regis­tra­tion. So if you are think­ing of attend­ing, email me for the code, either at my Sun email address or my Tex­tu­al­ity email address. Unless you’ve already got a code from one of the oth­er speak­ers of course… 

Privacy and Identity

 Identity and Privacy  No Responses »
Jun 272007
 

One of the bet­ter pieces on iden­tity and pri­vacy that I’ve read recently, and well worth every­one read­ing, wheth­er you do any­thing much with iden­tity man­age­ment or not, is from Dav­id Wein­ber­ger. Iden­tity man­age­ment in an unequal world dis­cusses how when sign­ing up for things is easi­er, people can take advant­age of that to ask us to sign up more often, to give more inform­a­tion than we really need to. I’ve been well trained at Sun to ask now why any­one needs the inform­a­tion they’re ask­ing for. Can­’t they do with less inform­a­tion? What are they going to do with it? These are the basic ques­tions every­one needs to ask every time some web site or shop asks for per­son­al inform­a­tion of any sort, basic­ally why do they want it and why do I need to give it? If more people ask the reas­on why, maybe few­er com­pan­ies will be need­lessly intrusive.

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