Northern Voice Almost Sold Out

As the title says, the North­ern­Voice con­fer­ence, to be held Feb­ru­ary 23 and 24 at the Forestry Sci­ences Centre at UBC, is almost sold out. As of Fri­day, there were only 50 spots left, and I’m sure at least some of those are now gone. So if you want to be there, now’s the time to fire up your browser and point it at the regis­tra­tion page.

NorthernVoice Additions

The Van­couver North­ern­Voice blog­ging con­fer­ence is in its third year now, and each year has brought some­thing new. Last year it was the uncon­fer­ence day (which we’re doing again this year, check out the cur­rent list of top­ics); this year it’s the Thursday even­ing din­ner + talk with more details and thoughts on the wiki page (so you can add your own com­ments and ideas) as well as the travel bursary.

The idea behind the bursary is to help people come to North­ern­Voice who might not oth­er­wise be able to; you just have to post some­thing on your own blog about why you want to attend NV to be eli­gible. OK, you also have to let us know. The clos­ing date is this Fri­day, so you don’t have all that long to craft those entries! 

I’m look­ing for­ward to this year’s con­fer­ence; NV is an ener­giz­ing small con­fer­ence with lots of people talk­ing about inter­est­ing things you’ve nev­er heard of before. And at $50 for two days, it’s cheap.

Moose Deadlines

The regis­tra­tion is open for North­ern Voice 2007 and the speak­er sub­mis­sions will be clos­ing on Fri­day Decem­ber 1st. We exten­ded the dead­line to let people recov­er from the tor­ren­tial down­pours, record snow­falls, high winds, and assor­ted oth­er draw­backs of Novem­ber in the Pacific North-West. 

And if you want a t‑shirt, you can vote on which col­our it should be as well! Just head over to the sur­vey and let us know.

XML 2006

The pro­gram for XML 2006 is up; Dav­id and the com­mit­tee (sup­por­ted by the review­ers) look to have done a good job in pick­ing papers. Unfor­tu­nately I won’t be attend­ing this year; I’ve learned from exper­i­ence that con­fer­ences and babies don’t mix (i.e., I could go to Boston but would not make it to enough talks to make the trip and the jet­lag worth­while), so I’ll be rely­ing on the blo­go­sphere and the pro­ceed­ings to keep me up to date. I hope you all enjoy yourselves – I’ll be there in spir­it if not in person.

CfS: NV2007

Enough acronyms for now — the Call for Speak­ers for North­ern­Voice 2007 is open! North­ern Voice is Van­couver­’s blog­ging con­fer­ence, focus­sing on per­son­al blog­ging. This means talks on how to solve some com­pany’s PR prob­lems are not really in scope, though tips on how to run a per­son­al blog when you’re also an exec­ut­ive at a well-known com­pany would be. We’re doing the two-day ver­sion again, where Moose­Camp is an “uncon­fer­ence” on Fri­day Feb­ru­ary 23rd, 2007, and the con­fer­ence prop­er is on Sat­urday Feb­ru­ary 24th, 2007.

In pre­vi­ous years we’ve held the con­fer­ence down­town in Van­couver, but we could­n’t get the space we wanted this year. So we’re going out to the UBC main cam­pus, way out west in Van­couver, about as far west as you can go without fall­ing off into the Geor­gia Strait (note, it’s still in Van­couver prop­er, south of the Lions Gate bridge). Cyp­ri­en man­aged to get us space in the Forestry Sci­ences Centre (pho­tos) so we can have all the space we need for talks and the self-organ­ized child­care. I think this will be a fun con­fer­ence, par­tic­u­larly as I’m not plan­ning on being any­where else the week before. Last year I was jet­lagged, hav­ing got back from a trip to Rome the night before, and I still had a good time at the conference.

Oth­er mem­bers of the organ­ising com­mit­tee have blogged it already: Bor­is, Bri­an, Dar­ren, and Kris all have their takes on what’s import­ant about this conference.

At the selec­tion meet­ing I’ll be look­ing for pro­posed talks that cov­er one or more of the groups of people we’ll have in the audi­ence. As a side-note, please don’t just say you can talk about any­thing. That really does­n’t help us fig­ure out who should talk on what — if you have an idea and we think a vari­ant of it would work bet­ter, don’t worry, we won’t be shy in ask­ing you to change focus a bit! I expect we’ll have few­er new­comers to blog­ging, although we will have some of those; to make up for it I expect we’ll have a cer­tain num­ber of people who feel they’ve already said everything that they can say and want to some tips on keep­ing up the excite­ment and interest in what they’re blog­ging. We’ll have some people who want tips on how to incor­por­ate pho­tos, video, or audio bet­ter, and some who still aren’t sure what style sheets are all about. In your speak­er sub­mis­sion, tell us who you’re aim­ing at and what know­ledge they need (or don’t); this will help us fig­ure out how to put everything togeth­er. This is a fun and edu­ca­tion­al con­fer­ence and good speak­ers are part of that, so please put a bit of time into those sub­mis­sions to make it easi­er for us to pick out the good speak­ers! The dead­line is Novem­ber 28th, and this is a real dead­line. Please do use the form and don’t just send us email as we want to make sure we don’t over­look any sug­ges­ted talks, or lose them in some­body’s over-eager spam fil­ter. Oh, and by the way, let us know of talks you’d like to see, even if you don’t want to give them.

Northern Voice Questions

North­ern Voice is a small Van­couver con­fer­ence on blog­ging, and I’m on the organ­iz­ing com­mit­tee. We’re gear­ing up for the 2007 con­fer­ence, which we were plan­ning on hold­ing in Feb­ru­ary, but we’ve run into some issues with the ven­ue. So we’ve come up with a sur­vey to ask people who were think­ing of attend­ing NV 2007 for opin­ions on the vari­ous options we have — it’s at NV 2007 Dates and Ven­ue Sur­vey. Clos­ing date is a week from today, that’s Septem­ber 13th. The sur­vey is short and should­n’t take more than a couple of minutes to fill in. Thanks!