Anyway

“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!

We just fin­ished the XML 2005 Plan­ning Com­mit­tee Selec­tion Meet­ing, three days at the end of last week. This is one of the fun, albeit exhaust­ing, parts of the con­fer­ence, when all the would-be speak­ers have sub­mit­ted their abstracts, the review­ers have graded them and com­men­ted on them, and then the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee gets to build a com­pel­ling sched­ule out of them.

The papers this year did­n’t fit into areas or tracks as neatly as in pre­vi­ous years; I think this means that XML usages are broad­en­ing away from the “clas­sic” publishing/web services/core tech­no­lo­gies and mov­ing into more mixed areas. It has­n’t been about the syn­tax for some years now, of course. There are papers that are show­ing more research into uses of XML, more rigour in design­ing sys­tems, and more emphas­is on get­ting things to work right.

Of course there were lots of papers where the authors proved they did­n’t both­er read­ing any of the hints on writ­ing abstracts on the con­fer­ence web site. When abstracts are meant to be 500 words long, those that are under 50 get short shrift by the review­ers. Those with mis­spelled acronyms or loaded up with buzzwords or that looked like advert­ise­ments for products did­n’t do too well either. For­tu­nately the review­ers did a good job at rank­ing the papers, and giv­ing us lots of com­ments to back up their grades, so I think we have a strong pro­gram this year, full of inter­est­ing con­tent. We’ll be pub­lish­ing the sched­ule once the accep­ted speak­ers have had a chance to con­firm their talks.

For those who don’t have speak­ing slots, or who get the dreaded rejec­tion email in the next week or so, don’t des­pair! We decided to keep the con­fer­ence con­tent really fresh this year by reserving 20% of the speak­ing slots for late-break­ing, instead of the usu­al 10%. So read over those writ­ing hints, mark your cal­en­dars for Septem­ber 16, and, come late July, see what holes we have in the sched­ule that your con­tent is per­fect for filling!