Submissions Season

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Mar 102011
 

It seems that the north­ern hemi­sphere spring is the reg­u­lar sea­son for sub­mit­ting papers for two of my favour­ite con­fer­ences. So I guess that means it’s the reg­u­lar sea­son for remind­ing y’all, and being reminded of the dif­fer­ent styles of conference.

First up, because the dead­line for abstracts is Monday March 14, is North­ern Voice, Van­couver­’s per­son­al, non-work, con­fer­ence aimed at help­ing people find their voice online, wheth­er that be through blog­ging, twit­ter, face­book updates, or pho­tos. I’ve been on the organ­ising com­mit­tee since the begin­ning of North­ern Voice, and have been con­sist­ent in want­ing a con­fer­ence that isn’t cor­por­ate, does­n’t give spon­sors key­note slots, isn’t ori­ented towards busi­ness and mak­ing money. What North­ern Voice is ori­ented towards is what people find import­ant for their per­son­al lives, wheth­er that be the per­en­ni­al ques­tion of blog­ging under a real or an assumed name, or giv­ing advice on how to cope with too many emails (ok, that one could also be use­ful in busi­ness). More details at the web site.

In con­trast there’s Bal­is­age, which is not at all about how to get good pho­tos of your cat, but rather a ven­ue for deeply tech­nic­al talks about markup in all its forms. It still isn’t cor­por­ate in the sense of selling key­note slots to big spon­sors (you notice a trend here?) and its audi­ence is lim­ited to those who do enjoy intense dis­cus­sions of how best to struc­ture their inform­a­tion, and for whom the finer details of the XML spe­cific­a­tions are not insig­ni­fic­ant. For this con­fer­ence abstracts aren’t enough, you need to write the full paper, in XML, and sub­mit by April 8th. I review papers most years, and look for­ward to see­ing what’s hap­pen­ing in the bleed­ing edges of XML-related technologies. 

Hmmm, it’s prob­ably not a coin­cid­ence that both of these con­fer­ences are small, and run by people who care pas­sion­ately about the con­fer­ence and the respect­ive com­munit­ies that they serve.

XML Summer School 2009

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Nov 202009
 

The XML Sum­mer School in Oxford at the end of Septem­ber was the usu­al mix of inter­est­ing present­a­tions, punt­ing, good dis­cus­sions in the pubs, and wan­der­ing around old build­ings. The pho­tos I took have none of the first, little of the last, and an over-pro­por­tion­al num­ber of punt­ing and pubs, mostly because that’s when the cam­era did its job best. These are all part of the XML Sum­mer School 2009 group on Flickr, if you want more pho­tos of that week in Oxford.

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Gearing up for Oxford

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Sep 042009
 

This year the XML Sum­mer School in Oxford is at the end of Septem­ber, rather a change from pre­vi­ous years, when it was in July. This morn­ing on the organ­ising call we decided that we need to go punt­ing on the Monday before din­ner rather than after din­ner, since the even­ings will be dark soon­er, but that’s about the only draw­back to the late-sum­mer timing. 

Apart from being heav­ily involved in organ­ising the event, I’m chair­ing two courses this year. There’s Trends and Tran­si­ents, a fun day with lots of dis­cus­sion and debate about hyped, over-hyped, and cur­rent tech­no­logy issues. This year we have Tony Coates talk­ing about how XML could have saved us from the cur­rent fin­an­cial crisis (some­what tongue-in-cheek), Paul Downey rant­ing on what’s wrong with Rich Inter­net Applic­a­tions, and Rich Salz telling you what to look for and avoid in cloud com­put­ing. The day is capped off by uncon­fer­ence ses­sions in the even­ing where every­one gets to have their say in as much length as people will listen to them. 

New this year is the oth­er course I’m chair­ing, the Semant­ic Tech­no­lo­gies course, where Bob DuCh­arme, Leigh Dodds, Andy Seaborne, and Duncan Hull are join­ing forces to teach classes in Linked Data, OWL, RDF, SPARQL, and all those oth­er acronyms that are form­ing the basis of what some people are call­ing Web 3.0. I’m look­ing for­ward to catch­ing up on what’s new in all of these, and fig­ur­ing out wheth­er some might be use­ful for a pro­ject I have in mind.

I haven’t decided which oth­er courses and classes I’ll sit in on yet; they all look good.

Twitter for Conferences

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Aug 042009
 

I’ve been asked by a couple of people involved in organ­ising con­fer­ences why they should have a con­fer­ence Twit­ter account, so I fig­ure it’s a gen­er­al enough ques­tion to be worth blog­ging. Basic­ally, it’s all about start­ing or con­tinu­ing your con­ver­sa­tion with those who attend, or might attend, or have atten­ded, or are inter­ested in the sub­jects your con­fer­ence covers.

If we take that as a start­ing point, then that answers the “why”, and Twit­ter itself answers the “how”, so we’re more or less left with the “what” (as in, what to tweet). Of course it depends on what sort of con­fer­ence you’re run­ning. One way to look at them is pre‑, dur­ing, and post-conference.

Pre-con­fer­ence: use twit­ter as an adjunct to the con­fer­ence web site, to remind people of impend­ing dead­lines, tell them of the new speak­ers who are signed up, or the new tracks that have been added. Even the fact that you’re get­ting the plan­ning com­mit­tee togeth­er is tweet-worthy, as it tells people the con­fer­ence is being planned, even if the web site does­n’t show it yet (and we all know how long it often takes to update the con­fer­ence web site). If the hotel is about to sell out, let people know. If fun swag has arrived for the attendees, let them know that too.

This is also the right time to tweet about art­icles or blog posts the speak­ers have writ­ten (point­ing out they’re speak­ing, of course), or news items related to the sub­ject of the conference. 

Dur­ing the con­fer­ence: you can remind people about today’s social events, tell them of changes to the sched­ule, remind them where the exhib­its are if you have an exhib­it hall. Point to people who are live-blog­ging the event, if any. Remind people which tag to use for pho­tos. I’d advise against tweet­ing so much inform­a­tion that people are pay­ing more atten­tion to the con­fer­ence tweets than the speak­ers; con­tests and the like can be dan­ger­ous for this reas­on (unless it’s a con­fer­ence based on twitter).

Post-con­fer­ence: point to blogs, write-ups, and photo pools from the event, let people know when plan­ning for the next one starts, ask for sug­ges­tions for speak­ers and top­ics for the next one.

A couple of tips about fol­low­ers: fol­low people who fol­low you, except for obvi­ous spam­mers or mar­keters. Con­sider fol­low­ing all the speak­ers you can. Don’t worry too much about how many fol­low­ers the con­fer­ence account has; if every speak­er retweets only the tweets about them, you’ll still pass the word around to people who by defin­i­tion should be inter­ested in the con­fer­ence con­tent.I’m sure there are oth­er ideas for con­tent, but these will at least get you started.

Summer of XML

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Apr 212009
 

One of my cur­rent pro­jects is as Course Dir­ect­or for the revamped XML Sum­mer School in Oxford, Eng­land. John Chel­som asked me to help out and I was only too happy to say yes; I have many fond memor­ies from pre­vi­ous years. It will be more a late-sum­mer school this year, being from Septem­ber 20–25, but that does free up more of the sum­mer prop­er for oth­er things, not to men­tion giv­ing us more time to fig­ure out the sched­ule and speakers. 

Anoth­er advant­age of late sum­mer for the XML Sum­mer School is that it does­n’t clash with Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal, Canada, which is on August 11–14 (with the sym­posi­um on pro­cessing XML effi­ciently on the 10th). Papers for that are due on April 24, so you don’t have much time to get them in if you’re plan­ning on speak­ing. Any markup-related top­ic is wel­come, as long as it is of suf­fi­cient qual­ity and depth.

It’s inter­est­ing com­par­ing the two — Bal­is­age is a geek’s con­fer­ence, unapo­lo­get­ic­ally aimed at people who are think deeply about the issues, even if they’re not apply­ing them at work. The XML Sum­mer School is more like train­ing, aimed at less expert prac­ti­tion­ers of and new­comers to XML, and more likely to be atten­ded by people who want to go back to work the next week and apply what they’ve learned dir­ectly. A few of the speak­ers are the same, of course, and the dis­cus­sions over din­ner tend to veer in some of the same directions. 

And, of course, both con­fer­ences are on Twit­ter; Bal­is­age at http://twitter.com/Balisage and the XML Sum­mer School at http://twitter.com/xmlsummerschool.

Balisage Participation

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Mar 182009
 

I’ve nev­er been to one of the really big con­fer­ences with thou­sands of people; I’ve heard the energy can be amaz­ing, and there is always some­thing inter­est­ing going on. I tend to find myself at smal­ler con­fer­ences where you have a chance to see people again whom you saw in the last talk, and can ask a ques­tion of a speak­er in a quieter moment than the imme­di­ate post-talk rush. 

Which is a way of remind­ing those inter­ested in the finer details of markup tech­no­lo­gies (XML, SGML, and oth­er related tech­no­lo­gies), that sub­mis­sions for one of my favour­ite small con­fer­ences, Bal­is­age, are due in a little over a month (April 24th, to be pre­cise). I’ve signed up to be a peer review­er, though I haven’t been act­ive enough in markup research and tech­no­lo­gies recently to sub­mit a paper myself.

If you are writ­ing a paper, I have some requests to make my life as a peer review­er easi­er (and make it more likely that I recom­mend your talk be accep­ted). Please explain what it’s all about clearly, defin­ing terms that may not be famil­i­ar to every­one, and above all, explain why it’s inter­est­ing! Too many papers I’ve seen assume that out­siders will magic­ally under­stand what’s valu­able; usu­ally a poor assump­tion. Spell-check the whole paper, and get someone else to proof it look­ing for gram­mat­ic­al errors, sen­tences that ramble on for too long, and phrases that make no sense. The tone should be pro­fes­sion­al but not bor­ing, as I will be mak­ing assump­tions as to wheth­er you can give a good talk based on the paper you sub­mit (it’s a blind review, so I won’t know who you are when I review your paper). And do fol­low the guidelines; they’re there for good reasons.

And the most import­ant thing, fail­ure to observe which res­ul­ted in my recom­mend­ing talks not be accep­ted last year des­pite poten­tially inter­est­ing top­ics: make sure the paper is long enough! A brief sum­mary with details to be filled in later is not suf­fi­cient to let the peer review­er know wheth­er there is real sub­stance that can stand up to 45 minutes of present­a­tion and discussion.

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