Category: Conference

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.

Found in my inbox this morning:

Hello,

I found your web­site http://www.xmlconference.org on Google. 

Your web­site has con­tent related to our’s at www.the-gallery-of-china.com.
This is a very high qual­ity web­site and is very well ranked on Google (PR7).

We are happy to upload a link onto this web­site in any way you request in exchange for a return link. I’m sure you appre­ci­ate that this would be of great bene­fit to us both.

fol­lowed by instruc­tions as to what inform­a­tion the XML con­fer­ence should put on its web site and how to send them the link inform­a­tion we want on their web site. 

The “Gal­lery of China” has some clas­sic­al-look­ing Chinese art; I’m not sure how suit­able it really is for the XML Art­work dis­play we’re hav­ing at XML 2004. So I guess we won’t link to it… 

I was lucky enough to go along to the Friends of O’Reilly camp; it’s a dif­fer­ent style of con­fer­ence. The recipe is to put a bunch of geeks togeth­er, give them a num­ber of rooms, feed them reg­u­larly, and see what they come up with. 

Con­tin­ue read­ing “FOO Camp”

The CSW XML Sum­mer School is where I typ­ic­ally spend the last week of July each year. As the name implies, it’s more like a school than a con­fer­ence, with the emphas­is on teach­ing imme­di­ately use­ful stuff rather than bleed­ing edge dis­course. I really enjoy going each year and there are lots of reas­ons for that.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “CSW XML Sum­mer School”

One of the hard parts about run­ning a con­fer­ence is fig­ur­ing out a reas­on­able strategy for the trade show. Some con­fer­ences don’t have a trade show at all; if you can get the attendees to pay all the costs asso­ci­ated with an event, then that’s a worth­while strategy. 

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Mak­ing Trade Shows Interesting”

A flurry of last-minute small edits this morn­ing (we thought we had it done 6 times, but 7 proved to be the lucky num­ber). The XML 2004 con­fer­ence sub­set of Doc­Book is ready for speak­ers to use to write their pro­ceed­ings. And for vendors to use to pro­duce cus­tom­ized edit­ors — tools will be lis­ted on the XML 2004 Con­fer­ence web site.

In the mean­time, if you don’t want to wait for tools to be ready, the schem­as and guidelines, com­plete with indi­vidu­al ele­ment doc­u­ment­a­tion, are to be found at Con­fer­ence Schema and Guidelines. The schema comes in three lan­guages: DTD, RELAX NG, and W3C Schema. 

BTW, the speed at which Norm Walsh can crank out updates to cus­tom­iz­a­tions of Doc­Book is mind-boggling.