Category: Conference

Con­fer­ence discussions

It’s Proceedings Time!

As usu­al for this time of year, the XML 2005 Con­fer­ence is mov­ing into the next level of pre­par­a­tion. There are quite a few spon­sors signed up already (Sun Microsys­tems, RenderX, Just­sys­tem, IBM, and DesignScience), the dead­line for late-break­ing and product present­a­tions and town hall sub­mis­sions is in 28 days (!!) and today we activ­ated the site for pro­ceed­ings sub­mis­sions. The pro­ceed­ing papers, which have to val­id­ate accord­ing to the con­fer­ence schema, are due on Septem­ber 16th.

The con­fer­ence has always had pro­ceed­ings and they really add to the value for attendees, as well as those who can­’t attend the con­fer­ence but wish to refer to the work after­wards. I wrote about this last year and won’t bore you by repeat­ing myself this year; suf­fice to say that much the same sys­tem applies. Norm Walsh helped immensely in tight­en­ing up the schema, apply­ing what I learned last year in clean­ing up the papers so that they all look good in the final HTML and PDF formats. The author­ing tool vendors have made spe­cial­ised tools avail­able for speak­ers, and this year RenderX is cre­at­ing the pro­ceed­ings sys­tem. (SchemaSoft, who made the pro­ceed­ings sys­tem last year, was acquired earli­er this year.)

On anoth­er note, hav­ing the con­fer­ence web site hos­ted by Bryght has been a great help. It’s easi­er for us to fix typos and make neces­sary changes to the con­tent, and we have access to a num­ber of fea­tures in the sys­tem, such as an RSS feed so people can keep up to date on the latest con­fer­ence news. Com­ments are wel­come on what oth­er fea­tures we should imple­ment — just add a com­ment on the site!

Trends and Transients

At the CSW XML Sum­mer School in Oxford this year, I chaired the Trends and Tran­si­ents track. This used to be called “What’s Hot and What’s Not” but people used to ask which of the speak­ers was talk­ing on the what’s not hot sub­ject, so I decided to change the title this year. As oth­ers have writ­ten, this year was as much fun as pre­vi­ous years, and I hope as inform­at­ive for the people attend­ing. One thing that was obvi­ous is that the XML growth curve con­tin­ues; lots of people attend­ing knew very little about XML oth­er than that they were expec­ted to imple­ment and use sys­tems that some­how were based on it. This, of course, is because it’s a school and not a con­fer­ence; the “Trends and Tran­si­ents” day is a bit of an excep­tion to that rule in that the top­ics are not neces­sar­ily focussed as much on learn­ing the tech­no­logy as in learn­ing how to eval­u­ate wheth­er a giv­en tech­no­logy that is cur­rently being hyped is worth­while or not. This leads to some inter­est­ing exchanges between the speak­ers, who are often of dif­fer­ent opin­ions. I some­times won­der wheth­er it’s a little con­fus­ing for the attendees who don’t know much about XML, but I was assured by many of them that they may not have under­stood it all, but it sure was enter­tain­ing (it was of course designed to be that way, hence hav­ing Tim Bray, Sean McGrath, and Tim McGrath as speakers). 

As usu­al, the rest of the Sum­mer School was enter­tain­ing and inform­at­ive and I got a good chance to talk to lots of people about what they’re doing with XML. And vis­it­ing Oxford is always a joy! Thanks again to the organ­isers (mostly Kerry Poult­er, who provides ster­ling ser­vice with a smile every year).

P.S. — please note use of the “Oxford comma” — I usu­ally like using it any­way, but find it par­tic­u­larly appro­pri­ate here :-).

Picking Papers

We just fin­ished the XML 2005 Plan­ning Com­mit­tee Selec­tion Meet­ing, three days at the end of last week. This is one of the fun, albeit exhaust­ing, parts of the con­fer­ence, when all the would-be speak­ers have sub­mit­ted their abstracts, the review­ers have graded them and com­men­ted on them, and then the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee gets to build a com­pel­ling sched­ule out of them.

The papers this year did­n’t fit into areas or tracks as neatly as in pre­vi­ous years; I think this means that XML usages are broad­en­ing away from the “clas­sic” publishing/web services/core tech­no­lo­gies and mov­ing into more mixed areas. It has­n’t been about the syn­tax for some years now, of course. There are papers that are show­ing more research into uses of XML, more rigour in design­ing sys­tems, and more emphas­is on get­ting things to work right.

Of course there were lots of papers where the authors proved they did­n’t both­er read­ing any of the hints on writ­ing abstracts on the con­fer­ence web site. When abstracts are meant to be 500 words long, those that are under 50 get short shrift by the review­ers. Those with mis­spelled acronyms or loaded up with buzzwords or that looked like advert­ise­ments for products did­n’t do too well either. For­tu­nately the review­ers did a good job at rank­ing the papers, and giv­ing us lots of com­ments to back up their grades, so I think we have a strong pro­gram this year, full of inter­est­ing con­tent. We’ll be pub­lish­ing the sched­ule once the accep­ted speak­ers have had a chance to con­firm their talks.

For those who don’t have speak­ing slots, or who get the dreaded rejec­tion email in the next week or so, don’t des­pair! We decided to keep the con­fer­ence con­tent really fresh this year by reserving 20% of the speak­ing slots for late-break­ing, instead of the usu­al 10%. So read over those writ­ing hints, mark your cal­en­dars for Septem­ber 16, and, come late July, see what holes we have in the sched­ule that your con­tent is per­fect for filling!

New XML Conference Site

Up till now, the XML Con­fer­ence web sites have been HTML-based with no con­tent man­age­ment fea­tures. For this year, we decided to take the plunge, so we can more eas­ily add fea­tures such as RSS feeds, col­lab­or­at­ive pages, and news aggreg­a­tion from spon­sors, exhib­it­ors, and speakers. 

With help from Bor­is Mann we have a Drupal-based site, hos­ted by Bryght. The site has been up for a week, and I think we’ve caught most of the bugs, but let Dave Kunkel know if you find any problems.

I’ve been look­ing for­ward to hav­ing these fea­tures for a while. We have aggreg­at­ors that hook to Pub­Sub feeds on “xmlconference.org” and “XMLConf2005”, so if you use one of those your blog entry should show up in the aggreg­at­or. We have an RSS feed for the front page to make it easi­er to keep up with changes. We can put up sub-sites for exhib­it­ors or speak­ers a lot more eas­ily than before. There are lots more fea­tures that we’re still fig­ur­ing out how best to use; sug­ges­tions on what we should do to make the site more use­ful to exhib­it­ors, speak­ers, and attendees, are welcome!

Northern Voice

The North­ern Voice blog­ging con­fer­ence was on Sat­urday. I was on the organ­iz­ing com­mit­tee and I was glad that all our efforts paid off. People seemed to really enjoy them­selves, chaos did­n’t even threaten to take over, and because some registered attendees did­n’t show up, we even man­aged to fit every­one in without exceed­ing the fire depart­ment reg­u­lated capa­city! There’s some­thing relaxed about put­ting on a con­fer­ence that only costs $CAD 20 to attend (of which a quarter went on the cof­fee and tea, so it was nice that we were praised for the tea selec­tion). We also had a good num­ber of spon­sors.

The con­fer­ence con­tents have been exhaust­ively covered in oth­er post­ings — I have nev­er been to an event that was so logged, blogged, and pho­to­graphed in my life! The first posts and pho­tos were going up 15 minutes in to the con­fer­ence — just check out the 566 pho­tos on Flickr, the Pub­Sub feed, the Tech­nor­ati feed, or the del.icio.us list­ing to get a fla­vour of the day. 

This was a small. light­weight con­fer­ence with lots of scope for people to talk. At $20, people could afford to come who knew little about tech­no­logy (e.g., the woman who asked Tim Bray what Sun Microsys­tems does, as she’d nev­er heard of it) but we also had people from way out­side Van­couver (Bay area, the UK, Toronto…) which I would­n’t have expec­ted. And they all seemed to get some­thing from it and star­ted ask­ing about next year. 

Per­son­al take-aways: I should­n’t be so form­al in what I write; writ­ing more rather than being per­fect is what I should focus on (I blame too many years spent writ­ing form­al sci­entif­ic papers). The RSS excerpt vs full feed debate goes on; one way to make sure Robert Scoble does­n’t read what you write is to only put head­lines in your feed, for example, and short excerpts are also likely to get your blog dumped from his feed list (one could per­haps think about wheth­er this is an advant­age or not, depend­ing on wheth­er you want someone in Microsoft pay­ing atten­tion to what you write). The biggest buzzwords were authen­ti­city and trans­par­ency and how to find the line between reveal­ing enough of your­self to be your­self, without com­prom­ising your or oth­er people’s pri­vacy. I also dis­covered that even in a con­fer­ence with only two tracks you can miss out on a lot and pod­casts only go so far in alle­vi­at­ing that. And that if people enjoy the day, they want to buy the t‑shirt.

XML Conference OAQ

This is not going to be a XML 2004 Con­fer­ence wrap-up, for sev­er­al reas­ons. Mostly because oth­er people have writ­ten about the con­fer­ence and the ses­sions they went to, partly because I did­n’t man­age to make it to very many ses­sions myself, and partly because it’s really far too late. The lead-up to the con­fer­ence is always very intense, the week itself is even more so, and it takes some time before I can col­lect my thoughts suf­fi­ciently to write a post­ing. I have a few ideas stacked up; this one made it to the top first.

A few people asked me ques­tions about the con­fer­ence so I figured I may as well answer them here, for pos­ter­ity, or for gen­er­al interest. Hence the OAQ. Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions are answered on the con­fer­ence web site; Occa­sion­ally Asked Ques­tions can be answered on the chair’s blog. By the way, the answers may or may not apply to the XML Con­fer­ence in any year that I was­n’t or won’t be chair, i.e., any past or future chair may have dif­fer­ent ideas on how things should work.

Do you sell key­note slots?
Some con­fer­ences do sell key­note slots (usu­ally by guar­an­tee­ing a key­note slot to any com­pany that spon­sors the con­fer­ence) but the XML Con­fer­ence (at least while I’m chair­ing) does­n’t. Com­pan­ies that do get key­notes some­times decide to spon­sor the con­fer­ence, but that’s their decision.
So how do you pick key­note speakers?
There are two cat­egor­ies of key­note speak­ers — inter­est­ing people, prefer­ably with a new or fresh per­spect­ive, and people who rep­res­ent com­pan­ies where the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee thinks that con­fer­ence attendees will be inter­ested in the vis­ion that com­pany has for some part of the XML industry. Some­times we’re lucky and a speak­er falls into both categories!
What guar­an­teed speak­ing slots do spon­sor com­pan­ies get?
Spon­sor com­pan­ies up until XML 2004 were guar­an­teed a product present­a­tion slot where they could talk about their products. For all oth­er talks, they need to go through the same pro­ced­ure as every­body else and be judged on the qual­ity of the abstract, how well it fits into the pro­gram, and how good the speak­er is.
“up until XML 2004”? What does that mean?
There’s always the pos­sib­il­ity that so many com­pan­ies will offer to spon­sor in any giv­en year that guar­an­tee­ing a product present­a­tion slot will no longer be pos­sible. I still have no inten­tion of guar­an­tee­ing any com­pany, wheth­er spon­sor or not, a speak­ing slot that isn’t a product present­a­tion slot. Every­one has to earn their slot!
What is a product present­a­tion slot anyway?
A product present­a­tion slot is a 45-minute talk that is freed from the con­straint of not talk­ing about products that all oth­er talks need to fol­low. The idea is that often people really do want to know about products and fea­tures in a present­a­tion set­ting, where someone has time to go through import­ant fea­tures. Product present­a­tions are selec­ted dif­fer­ently to oth­er talks; exhib­it­ors on the show floor have pref­er­ence, talks that show­case products from more than one vendor work­ing togeth­er have pref­er­ence, and products that are based on stand­ards have pref­er­ence. The product talks are in a spe­cial track, so attendees know what they’ll be getting.
Some people do show products in the oth­er talks, what’s with that?
Tech­nic­al work is often best illus­trated by show­ing a demo. As long as the demo con­cen­trates on the tech­nic­al aspects of what’s being talked about, and not about whatever cool fea­tures the product has, it still qual­i­fies as a non-product talk. This is a fine line that some people man­age well and oth­ers don’t, which is why ses­sion chairs are pre­pared to stop any talk that goes too far into product demon­stra­tion ter­rit­ory when it isn’t meant to.
I’ve noticed lots of product tutori­als though — what about those?
The Plan­ning Com­mit­tee dis­cussed this one quite a lot. We decided that there is room for tutori­als on how to use products as long as the products are reas­on­ably pop­u­lar, and the tutori­al is clearly labelled as being about product X from Com­pany Y. This ensures that poten­tial attendees know what they are pay­ing for. If they don’t want a product tutori­al, they don’t go to it.