Category: Conference

Con­fer­ence discussions

Summer Identity

The cur­rent weath­er fore­cast for Van­couver is sunny and warm (into the high 20s; around 80 F) mak­ing it a pretty good place to be right now. All the garden­ers of course are busy turn­ing on the water­ing sys­tems, but giv­en Van­couver also has lots of water this isn’t as much of a prob­lem as in oth­er places. We’re look­ing for­ward to hav­ing a decent sum­mer this year, unlike the last one which was basic­ally miser­able for most of the time.

Which makes Van­couver a pretty good place to be in July: the weath­er is usu­ally superb, sunny and warm but not too hot, life reas­on­ably relaxed, the sea­wall and beaches full but not over­flow­ing. Just the right time of year for stand­ards com­mit­tee meet­ings! I’ve hos­ted DOM WG meet­ings in Van­couver in August, with par­ti­cipants enjoy­ing the com­bin­a­tion of effect­ive work and a bit of tour­ist­ing. If you’re look­ing for an excuse to vis­it Van­couver, now’s your chance — not only is the Liberty Alli­ance hold­ing one of its quarterly spon­sors meet­ings in July (the week of July 17th, to be pre­cise), it’s also hold­ing a con­fer­ence jointly with the Inter­net Iden­tity Work­shop on the Thursday and Fri­day. This will fol­low the stand­ard IIW “uncon­fer­ence” format, to allow for lots of flex­ib­il­ity in top­ics and speak­ers. The attendee list is cer­tainly impress­ive! I’ll be there for as long as the baby lets me (I assume she’ll be the young­est participant).

Liberty Alli­ance non-mem­bers will also be wel­come to attend the Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing itself on Tues­day and Wed­nes­day (NDAs will have to be signed). This is the first time that the Liberty Alli­ance has opened up a spon­sor meet­ing to non-mem­bers in this way; I hope lots of people who are inter­ested in iden­tity issues take the oppor­tun­ity to find out more about what the Liberty Alli­ance does and how it operates.

Regis­tra­tion for both the Open­Space event and the Liberty meet­ing for non-mem­bers is at Iden­tity Open­Space Regis­tra­tion; early-bird regis­tra­tion is now closed but it’s still cheap­er to register now than onsite.

If you want an altern­at­ive set of hotel, res­taur­ant, and tour­ism recom­mend­a­tions, try the North­ern Voice Van­couver page (North­ern Voice is the blog­ging con­fer­ence I help organ­ise each year). The Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing hotel is about a block from the North­ern Voice con­fer­ence location.

BCNet Liberty

Yes­ter­day I gave a talk at the (for­tu­nately) loc­al BCNET/Netera Con­ver­ging Minds Con­fer­ence. BCNet builds net­works for the BC research and edu­ca­tion com­munity, and the con­fer­ence was aimed at the admin­is­trat­ors, deans, and IT man­agers who need to know what tools their research­ers and stu­dents would find use­ful. The con­fer­ence agenda had talks on lots of sub­jects rel­ev­ant to that audi­ence, ran­ging from high per­form­ance com­put­ing, net­work­ing, and secur­ity and iden­tity man­age­ment to advanced media and collaboration.

My talk was about Liberty spe­cific­a­tions, of course. Since I was slot­ted for a 1.5 hour talk, I asked Alex Acton from the Sun Van­couver office to help out. I presen­ted the slides, Alex drove the demos, we got lots of great ques­tions, went 15 minutes over­time and still only got through 29 of the 41 slides. It was prob­ably more use­ful to the audi­ence that way, of course! I like hav­ing a small enough audi­ence that more free-form talk­ing and listen­ing ses­sions are viable. Here are the slides (in PDF format) for pos­ter­ity, includ­ing those I did­n’t get a chance to present.

I had lots of help on cre­at­ing these from Eve, I used demos from Pat and Hubert (Hubert also cre­ated good slides for the recent Liberty web­cast that I could reuse), Scott Can­tor sent me slide decks on Shib­boleth to crib inform­a­tion from, and most of the deploy­ment inform­a­tion comes from Yvonne Wilson’s excel­lent talk at XML 2005. I also used some inform­a­tion from the Liberty tech­no­logy tutori­al. Thanks, everyone!

NV 2006

At North­ern Voice this year I was jet-lagged, hav­ing arrived from Rome about 10 pm the night before, so did­n’t make it to any­where near the num­ber of talks I wanted to go to. I did go to Nancy White’s, which was an excel­lent, lively, enter­tain­ing ses­sion. It gave me lots to think about in terms of how to make my own present­a­tions more inter­est­ing (ok, that may not have been the point to her talk, but it was one of my take-aways), as well as how (little) I blog and what I should do about it. Blog more, I know, but get­ting over the “I haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been busy, so what should I start with” hump can be more dif­fi­cult than it appears. Not really writers block, more like “is it worth­while writ­ing on this when I haven’t writ­ten for so long”-block. Hmmm, more think­ing needed on that one.

One oth­er nice thing about North­ern Voice is meet­ing a range of people whose blogs I’ll start look­ing at, that I would­n’t know of oth­er­wise, and hav­ing dis­cus­sions on issues ran­ging from glob­al cli­mate change to SAML!

I took part in a pan­el (three non-law­yers, so we wrote WANL (IANAL for three people) up on the white­board in big let­ters) that described some hassles people can run into with blogs and some basic things to do (like be care­ful what you write, blog­gers are journ­al­ists in some ways and can be sued, and fig­ure out wheth­er it’s worth the hassle before you decide to fight). I learnt quite a few things and I hope the rest of the audi­ence did too. Includ­ing the fact that some­times you really need a real law­yer, but it’s not always an easy task to find someone who is an expert in this area, and there’s not a lot of case law, espe­cially when it comes to cross-jur­is­dic­tion­al issues. A com­ment on Jef­fery Simpson’s blog men­tioned it would be bet­ter to have had a real law­yer there on the pan­el; as Dar­ren poin­ted out, we did try! Maybe one of the three people in the audi­ence who admit­ted to being law­yers will volun­teer to give a talk next year, although I would expect it to be as full of “this is not leg­al advice” dis­claim­ers as our pan­el was (law­yers seem to like say­ing that sen­tence when talk­ing in gen­er­al terms, such as at a con­fer­ence or an art­icle on a web site). Some of the ques­tions were about what to do if someone tries a deni­al of ser­vice attack on your web site (basic answer: you may need to move to an ISP that has the infra­struc­ture to cope with it, as send­ing a cease and desist let­ter, always assum­ing you can find an address to send it to, may not have the desired effect, espe­cially if it’s to anoth­er coun­try). Most blog­gers won’t run into any of these prob­lems, of course, there’s some­thing to be said for being safely down in the long tail!

Any­way, here are a few web sites you might like to look at if you’re inter­ested in the gen­er­al top­ic. Some are from my own research, and oth­ers from the dis­cus­sion at NV. They’re in no par­tic­u­lar order.

Northern Voice 2006

I’m on the organ­ising com­mit­tee for North­ern Voice again this year, the small, non-cor­por­ate blog­ging con­fer­ence that was such fun last year. This year prom­ises to be just as good, although I’ll be com­ing in jet­lagged and won’t make it to the add-on Moose Camp (y’all have a good time there without me, ok?). 

We’ve finally put the sched­ule up, and the regis­tra­tion page is live, and it looks like we will have a full house again, with regis­tra­tions this year filling up much faster than for last year. So if you want to make sure you can attend, and you’re not milling around hop­ing for last-minute can­cel­la­tions, regis­ter­ing soon is your best hope! And no, we can­’t sneak more people in as we have strict num­ber lim­its due to fire reg­u­la­tions. Sorry.

Five Years On

“The time has come, the wal­rus said” — not to talk of cab­bages and kings, nor even of seal­ing wax, but to move on and let someone else with fresh ideas take over chair­ing the XML Con­fer­ence Series. XML 2001 was the first con­fer­ence I chaired, XML 2005 the last. It’s been an inter­est­ing jour­ney, full of inter­est­ing people and inter­est­ing top­ics. I’ll miss many aspects of chair­ing — the pos­it­ive side of inter­act­ing with attendees, review­ers, ses­sion chairs, and speak­ers, but I am relieved I no longer have to plan my entire year around one week in Novem­ber, clean dozens of XML papers (well, once this year’s final pro­ceed­ings are done), or worry about how many last-minute can­cel­la­tions or no-shows we’ll have (e.g., this year, for some reas­on we had a large num­ber of can­cel­la­tions so I was glad I had a form­al waitl­ist of speak­ers and talks).

When I took the job, I set out to make a con­fer­ence that I would want to attend and con­trib­ute to. To me, the key was com­munity involve­ment. A con­fer­ence is only as good as the speak­ers allow it to be; you need know­ledgable speak­ers talk­ing on inter­est­ing top­ics if you’re to give attendees a reas­on to both­er attend­ing. How do you get good speak­ers to attend? You make sure there are lots of oth­er good speak­ers attend­ing, so they can all talk and learn and net­work. The ideal con­fer­ence to my mind is quiet dur­ing ses­sions, noisy dur­ing cof­fee breaks, and every­one goes away exhausted but exhil­ar­ated from everything they’ve seen, heard, and thought about. Includ­ing the com­munity in this pro­cess was key, and I was for­tu­nate in that so many people in the XML com­munity were happy to help out, wheth­er as plan­ning com­mit­tee mem­bers, review­ers, speak­ers, or ses­sion chairs.

I set up a plan­ning com­mit­tee to help with final decisions, and designed a peer review sys­tem that was easy for the review­ers (give a grade from 1 to 4 and add com­ments) so people would­n’t mind review­ing. One review­er said it was just like read­ing a sched­ule and decid­ing which talks he’d both­er attend­ing, which I liked. The review­ers made the plan­ning com­mit­tee’s work in pick­ing the final set of talks for the sched­ule pos­sible. Many of the review­ers were happy to be ses­sion chairs for the con­fer­ence itself, help­ing out speak­ers (par­tic­u­larly new speak­ers), mod­er­at­ing ques­tions, and, to my mind, under­scor­ing the fact that this is a com­munity con­fer­ence. I don’t really like con­fer­ences that don’t have ses­sion mod­er­at­ors or chairs as it seems imper­son­al somehow.

And then there were the smal­ler touches I could bring in as chair. For example, many con­fer­ences hand out speak­er gifts, which are usu­ally small, semi-use­less tech toys that die after 3 uses. I decided that per­son­ally I’d rather have a speaker/reviewer recep­tion to attend, so that’s what we did. And I star­ted the XML Cup to recog­nise people whose con­tri­bu­tions seemed to cry out for more recog­ni­tion; again, this was inten­ded as some­thing for the community. 

My reward has been con­fer­ences where people are involved, where the hall­ways are quiet dur­ing ses­sions and the cof­fee breaks busy, where attendees come up and say “my man­age­ment told me to attend and it’s been really great!”, where ideas and tech­niques cross-pol­lin­ate from one field to anoth­er. This year it became par­tic­u­larly obvi­ous that we could­n’t pigeon-hole talks any more, they were all applic­able to mul­tiple tracks and had applic­a­tions far out­side the uses of XML even 3 years ago. XML is truly a basic part of today’s IT infra­struc­ture in ways that few would have been brave enough to pre­dict when I star­ted chair­ing these con­fer­ences. And I like to think that at least some of that is due to this con­fer­ence: ker­nels of ideas that are passed around, net­work­ing, and the incub­a­tion effect of hav­ing lots of experts in close prox­im­ity who can bounce ideas and crazy thoughts off each other.

Dav­id Meg­gin­son will be chair­ing XML 2006 (Nov 13–17, 2006, in Seattle). He’ll do a good job and will bring fresh ideas and energy to the con­fer­ence. It will be inter­est­ing for me to sit back and watch how it develops!