This year’s Northern Voice was held downtown, and was smaller than the last couple of years. I like the small conference personally, it’s easier to chat with lots of different people, the lines at registration aren’t as long, and the conference as a whole feels more personal. This is the strength of Northern Voice for me, it’s a pleasant contrast to large conferences where keynotes are sold to the sponsors and there are advertising banners everywhere. Yes, Northern Voice has sponsors who show up and have a presence and maybe even a table, but they are all respectful of the spirit of the conference. For which I, at least, am grateful.
I spent the first bit of the conference helping out on the registration table. A certain amount of hectic, but not too bad. I then moderated Martha Rans’ talk on Copyright for Canadians did a good job, I thought, of giving information without overwhelming everyone. The Artists Legal Outreach site has more in-depth information, in what they call toolkits.
Lunch at the W2 cafe was great and the big wooden circles in the middle of the atrium space were full of people chatting while balancing plates and glasses. After lunch I sat in on MooseCamp for a while, knitting and listening and relaxing. And singing with Nancy and the ukuleles. I really must get back to singing, it’s been a long time since I sang regularly.
Another important talk was Daniel Cowen’s talk on privacy. A lot of the subject matter was familiar to me from my work at Sun, where I was part of a privacy and identity group, but Daniel took it a step further by seeing how much someone without specialised tools or knowledge could find out about someone online. In four hours they had a worrying amount of information about a woman they code-named “Tara”, enough to run any number of social engineering attacks or compromise any “secret question” systems. People in the session were genuinely shocked at just how much information is available online, and how many details, innocuous in themselves, can be added together.
Friday ended with the wine tasting and party in the atrium.
Saturday dawned bright and early with Blaine Cook’s wonderful keynote, celebrating diversity in culture, life, and technology platforms in the face of globalisation and market forces. He tied together architecture, rainforest, and people fighting to save their culture with the domination by large platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to encourage diversity and independence.
Shane Birley’s keynote was of a different style but had some of the same underlying themes, celebrating individual voice, charting his personal journey online, and encouraging all of us to try out new ways of communicating and sharing who we are. All delivered in inimitable Shane style, of course!
All in all, it was a lot of work and I was exhausted by the end of the two days, but it was all worthwhile. The energy and enthusiasm was obvious with all the discussions and interactions and it’s also been great to see all the tweets and blog posts continue.
