Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'conferences' articles

OSCON: what are your must-see talks?

2008-07-01T16:00:17Z

We've switched on personal schedule sharing on the OSCON web site.

When you've put together your desired schedule by starring sessions of interest, just hand out the "public view" link to let others know what you want to see.

Here's my personal schedule. In it you'll find all the plenary sessions (as co-chair I simply cannot miss these, and neither should you, however late the party!)

Also there's a fair smattering of my pet topics such as open web technologies, virtualization and dynamic languages, and a bunch of things I want to hear more about: Prophet, female participation in open source, Clutter, and of course Erlang.

I'm fascinated to find out what other people have got planned, so please publish your schedules too and let's compare notes.

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My OSCON 2008 picks

2008-06-26T12:11:33Z

In just under a month, the tenth O'Reilly Open Source Convention will get underway in Portland.

Over ten years OSCON has developed—along with the world of open source—into an intense, exciting, informative, diverse and exhausting event. This year I've the privilege of being co-chair, along with Alison Randall. We've packed so much into the show, it's a difficult job even being able to comprehend it as a whole!

Fortunately, there's a way to start making sense of things before you arrive there, thanks to the personal scheduler. Just mark the sessions you want to go to with a star, and you'll be able to plan out your time in advance.

I wanted to list a few sessions from my own personal schedule that particularly piqued my interest. Then at the bottom of this post I'll share a discount code which can give readers of this blog 15% off OSCON registration. There's bribery for you.

Practical Erlang Programming

Largely thanks to XMPP enthusiasts and ejabberd, I've been hearing increasing amounts about Erlang, and I'd like to know enough about it to be dangerous. This three hour tutorial looks just the ticket.

Open Source Virtualization Hacks

This is one of several sessions we have on virtualization, something I'm particularly pleased about. Virtualization may be "done" at the kernel level, but I think we're only just starting out on its application. This session is by my friend and sometime co-author, Niel Bornstein, who works for Novell on just this sort of thing.

Using Puppet: Real World Configuration Management

Puppet is the piece of open source software that is most exciting to me at the moment. As a developer, it enables me to manage my machines like I'd manage my code libraries. A must-see if you've not used Puppet yet.

These are just 3 out of the 300 or so confirmed sessions. Don't forget there's a large number of events and parties happening around OSCON too.

And finally, the discount code. Use the code os08pgm when you're registering, and you'll get 15% off the ticket price.

See you in Portland!

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RailsConf, remotely

2008-06-02T12:41:36Z

I couldn't make it to RailsConf this year, but have been playing my part from afar. It gives me a small kick of pride to note that now RailsConf is run entirely out of Expectnation, which is of course Rails-based.

Here's a badge I clipped for my virtual scrapbook.

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Dublin and San Francisco

2008-05-02T17:33:49Z

About to go off travelling again.

Next week is of course XTech 2008, so I'll be in Dublin with some of the smartest people working in web technology today. The schedule looks fantastic, and we've still got proposals coming in for the Lightning Talks, which promise to be highly entertaining and informative.

If you didn't yet book, don't worry that you missed the online registration deadline, you can still register on-site.

Where 2.0

After XTech, it's straight to San Francisco (well, Burlingame) for the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference. Although I'm interested in the conference, my main reason for going is that we're launching a new addition to our onsite check-in system: magnetic stripe conference badges.

Here's a proof image of my badge.

I've really enjoyed working with making badges: every so often as a software person, you get to write something that creates a physical artefact. I guess this is one reason Arduino is so popular.

It's also been interesting as we're working entirely within Linux. Specialized hardware like badge printers tends to be primarily aimed at Windows machines. Happily, the Evolis range of printers has CUPS drivers too.

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Freelancing in the internet industry

2008-04-01T09:47:00Z

For all but the earliest part of my career I've either been, or been close to, freelancers in the web and free software world. While going solo is a rush of excitement, freedom and invention, there are also the hard parts of business to consider. I've seen too many people lose confidence and return to less liberated employment because they couldn't get to grips with the basics of getting work.

This is why I'm really happy to see Stephanie Booth's Going Solo conference, coming up in May this year in Lausanne. It's for freelancers and self-employed people in the internet industry, and will cover all the nitty gritty aspects of working alone, including business, marketing and the essentials of ensuring doing what you enjoy doesn't become a chore.

I'll end with quoting from a recent posting of Stephanie's, A Theory About Freelancers in the Internet Industry. This struck a chord with me, and is what makes me think Going Solo is going to be an excellent event.

Most freelancers go solo because they are good at doing something that people are willing to pay for, and attracted by the freedom of being one’s own boss and the perspective of possible lucrative earnings. Business skills are not usually paid much attention to until they are suddenly needed, although they are what will determine how successful one can be in the long run. At that point, it’s common for the soloist to feel lost and isolated.

Going Solo is a one-day event that was designed to address this issue. We will gather 150 soloists and small business owners around a core group of speakers who are experienced freelancers and will share their knowledge on a variety of business topics. We also want to give freelancers an occasion to come in direct contact with others like them and build a European community where they can support each other.

(Note: My conference software company, Expectnation, is a sponsor of Going Solo, and it's been great for us to learn more about empowering small, focused operations as well as some of our larger customers.)

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XTech registration open, schedule published

2008-03-20T15:07:40Z

Registration is now open for XTech 2008. We're in Dublin, Ireland, from May 6-9.

We've also now published the full schedule. You can use the clickable stars by each session to put together your own personal schedule for the conference.

If you're new to XTech, here's what to expect: a thought-provoking, well-informed and friendly conference covering the latest in Web and open standards technology.

If you've been to XTech before, you should expect more of the same, with the usual inclusion of new directions and controversy.

Keynotes

Our keynotes this year are all people with whom one could never get enough time: Simon Wardley, who has great insight on the dynamics of open standards and open source, and presents them in a very engaging and entertaining way; Sean McGrath, whom to call a Python, XML and mobile expert would be to ignore 99.5% of his talent; and David Recordon of SixApart, one of the chief brains behind OpenID and a very nice man indeed.

Tutorials

As usual, XTech kicks off with a day of tutorials. I'm absurdly proud of the faculty we have together: hear about jQuery from Simon Willison, XSLT from Tony Graham and Doug Tidwell, XForms from Steven Pemberton and Web 2.0 from Eric van der Vlist.

And that's just to start. This year we've two tutorials that have the potential to change the way you develop systems and services.

A practical introduction to hardware hacking with Arduino

If you've not heard of Arduino before, it's an open source electronics prototyping platform that's very easy to build with.

Why is a web conference is featuring hardware? Think about our theme "the web on the move." The next step for the web is out of our computers in into our gadgets and lives, we already saw a start to that in our conference last year with presentations on mobile devices and physical hyperlinks.

Arduino removes the barrier to entry for those who think of themselves as "software people", and is a fantastic way to start bringing your web applications into physical environments. I highly recommend the tutorial as way of expanding the horizons of your web development. (A similar tutorial at O'Reilly's ETech conference sold out within days!)

Building CouchDB Applications

All of a sudden the web application database choice stopped being the traditional one of MySQL, Oracle or PostgreSQL. A new breed of databases has emerged, speaking the language of the modern web: REST, JSON and JavaScript.

The open source CouchDB, backed by IBM, is the frontrunner among this new breed of databases. It's a document oriented, non-relational database management system. And here's the key thing: it's distributed by default. Check out the CouchDB Quick Overview for more details.

CouchDB expert Jan Lehnardt will be teaching a half day tutorial.

BOFs, Lightning Talks

As usual we'll be running Birds-of-a-Feather sessions and Lightning Talks, both of which will be open to public participation. Look out for calls for involvement in both those soon.

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Last few days for XTech CFP

2008-01-22T11:55:14Z

There are only a few days now to submit your proposal for XTech 2008 (May 6-9, Dublin, Ireland.)

We're looking for tutorial and presentation proposals. All speakers get free conference registration, and further assistance is available to tutorial presenters.

Our theme this year, "the web on the move", couldn't be more timely, whether you're thinking about data portability, web based platforms or mobile devices. This theme will work its way through our usual coverage of open technologies, browsers, open data and web development.

Your audience will be people just like you: responsible for innovating and leading technology choices in their organizations or open source. Check out last year's speaker list and proceedings to get a feel for the conference.

This year's keynote speakers will be Sean McGrath, Simon Wardley and David Recordon.

There's only until the end of this week left, so submit your proposal now! I look forward to seeing you in Dublin.

XTech 2008 call for participation is open

2007-12-05T15:22:37Z

I'm pleased to announce the Call for Participation for XTech 2008. We'll be in Dublin, Ireland from May 6-9th.

Our theme for this year is "The Web on the Move". I'm not just talking about your shiny new iPhone, but about the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet. XTech 2008 will explore the benefits, issues, practicalities and fun of a web built on open standards, open source and commodity technology.

The confluence of virtualization, open APIs and open data standards has really made me think. Today, you probably trust somebody else to store your email. Tomorrow, they'll be running your applications, providing you your computing power and exchanging your data with other providers.

XTech 2008 will cover portability in all its senses, including shared identity, data, mobile client devices, machine virtualization and more, in addition to our usual run of technical web development topics including Ajax, markup, programming and operations.

Just as importantly as the content, XTech is the place to meet others who are shaping the web as we know it. Take a look at last year's speaker list and presentations. If these are the people and organizations you want to argue with, be inspired by and challenge, I'd love you to be part of this year's speaker list.

Head on over to the Call for Participation, and be sure to get your proposals in by January 25th!

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Edd 10.5 release notes

2007-11-14T16:05:58Z

I’ve had my head down with lots of hard work and exciting developments, and alas too little time to blog here. However, I wanted to post a few updates as to what’s been going on.

Expectnation

Most of my time’s been spent working on Expectnation, the conference and event management application my company works on.

The highlight of this quarter is that we launched registration facilities, so now in addition to planning content, creating your event web site and managing speakers, you can take money and register folk for your conference.

We’re very excited about adding this, and it makes Expectnation the ideal “conference in a box” system.

It’s a complete buzz to see submissions coming in for RailsConf using our software—Rails-based, of course!

Conferences

I’m currently gearing up to open the call for participation for XTech 2008. We’ll be in Dublin, Ireland, in early May 2008. More soon on this front.

Additionally, I’m going to be co-chair with Allison Randal for O’Reilly’s OSCON 2008. I can’t really say I’m filling Nat Torkington’s shoes (more like ironing his shirts) but needless to say it’s a great privilege about which I’m thoroughly excited.

With being so busy, I’ve not had the time to travel as nearly as much as I’d like this year (the small matter of the baby twins has some bearing on this, too). I’m very sad to be missing XML 2007, as the XML crowd remains the most erudite, eclectic and friendly bunch of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with.

Writing

My sporadic attempts to attain literary posterity will again come to the fore over the next few months, as a new project starts with my old friend and co-conspirator Simon St.Laurent. All hush-hush for now, but I look forward to sharing the news and maybe some early-access content here.

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BarCamps and unconferences: what software support do you need?

2007-06-14T18:14:54Z

My latest venture, Expectnation, is conference management software aimed primarily at the traditional form of running conferences. The schedule, speakers and topics are all lined up in advance.

Campers at O'Reilly's Foo Camp unconference

However, many conferences now are taking the form of "unconferences" in whole or part, exemplified by the BarCamp movement. At these events, the schedule is assembled just in time, and almost everybody is a presenter.

The same problems exist for BarCamp organizers as for conventional event organizers. They still need to use a bunch of diverse tools for their web sites, registration, communication and reportage. Expectnation solves this problem by being a "one-stop shop" tool for conventional conference structures, and we want to do it for BarCamps and unconferences too.

Tell me what you need

I'm asking for feedback from attendees and organizers of BarCamp-like events as to what kinds of features they're seeking in their support software. We already have the platform to build on, and we want to find out the best ways in which to do it.

The sort of subject areas I'm keen to hear about include

registration,
attendee social networking,
documenting the event,
tools already in use, and their effectiveness.

If you have views on this, please join the discussion thread over on the forums. It's worth restating too that I'm very keen to talk about this with attendees as well as organizers.

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Launching Expectnation

2007-06-01T17:13:00Z

I'm very pleased to announce the launch of Expectnation, a web application for managing conferences.

What does it do?

Expectnation is intended to replace the ad-hoc collection of emails, spreadsheets, documents and hacks that hold together the organization of most conferences. The aim is to improve the quality and reliability of communication between the organizers, speakers and attendees.

But it doesn't stop there. What I'm really excited about is the chance to enhance the conference experience through the web. Expectnation is capable of managing the complete web site for a conference, which provides many opportunities for bringing the best of the social software world to augment events.

Our tagline is "build your conference into a community", which underpins a key aim: to help organizers make events more relevant and useful to attendees, and to live on beyond the event itself. We do this in two ways: saving time, so you can spend it on improving your conference, and providing online tools to support community building.

Right now Expectnation is able to manage the proposal, review, scheduling and publication of presentations, along with the conference web site and smart emailing to speakers, reviewers and chairs. Over the next two months we'll be introducing our registration module, with optional online payments, and working on extending the social software features available for attendees.

Take a look

I'm really excited about letting users get started with Expectnation, and seeing the uses it gets put to. We believe Expectnation will be just as handy for organizing events inside an organization as for traditional conferences.

So, if you organize, speak at, or attend conferences of any sort, please check out Expectnation and recommend it to a conference organizer near you!

Related links

Expectnation tour complete with screenshots
Previous posts I've written about Expectnation
XTech 2007 was completely managed inside Expectnation

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My preview of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2007

2007-03-09T11:34:35Z

I was honoured to be on the ETech 07 programme committee. Alas, I can't get there this year due to the very enjoyable reason of recent parenthood. Nevertheless, here are some of the talks I'd earmarked to attend.

Creating Addictive User Experiences (Kathy Sierra)

Is it possible to say too many good things about Kathy Sierra? Any project or product built with attention to her advice about empowering users gets a huge head start to popularity and success. I was fortunate enough to spend a day with Kathy last year on a training course, and it was great to see the passion and commitment from her writing runs through her as a person, even behind the scenes.

Applied Web Heresies (Avi Bryant)

I'd go to this one out of insatiable curiosity. I believe that web conventions enable rapid application design (c.f. REST in Rails) but here's an argument that not following them also reaps rewards. Attend this talk prepared for involvement. I've never met a Squeaker without attitude.

Making Offline Web Applications a Reality (Zimbra)

A short product talk, but taking web apps offline is an area to watch. Even if you don't think offline is that important to you, many of the same principles apply to application mobility. Take that key app data off onto your phone, watch or memory stick.

Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control (Charles Armstrong)

More user-facing stuff. How do you give a user of a large nondeterministic piece of social software the idea that they're in control? This is an important topic to me: note how many pieces of social software fall by the wayside right away. For some, it's lack of utility, but that's influenced too by the degree of engagement and control a user feels.

No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral (Tom Loosemore)

There is no good reason not to listen to Tom Loosemore. Especially when he feels strongly about something. The idea of this talk is a "vision of a cheap consumer device sitting under your TV that will capture, store, and share all TV, forever." The TV industry sure needs its visionaries.

Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication (Dale Dougherty)

Dale was responsible for getting my XML career off the ground, and you can find him at work behind some of the smartest things O'Reilly's done over the years. Make magazine was one of those, and now he's moving on to Craft. Design patterns for, er, real designs.

RFID Guardian: A Personal Platform for RFID Privacy Management (Melanie Rieback)

Jamming bad RFIDs. Having just taken delivery of an RFID-enabled passport, this is starting to come home to me.

Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers (Marc Hedlund)

Despite the cute title, lots of good stuff here. Expectnation is going to end up with a truck load of user registrations, and their privacy is important to me. I imagine there'll be some good debate in the Q&A session for this talk.

JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again! (James A. Duncan)

I've recently got the JS bug, thanks to JQuery. It's actually a fun and malleable language to work in. I'd go to this talk looking for fellow travellers and hints, though I'm a bit skeptical about Zimki itself.

ETech 2007 registration

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XTech 2007 schedule: behind the scenes

2007-02-23T19:02:07Z

After a couple of months' hard work, I've posted the schedule for XTech 2007. And, though I say so myself, it looks good.

You can read more about the schedule itself over on the XTech web site, but I thought it would be interesting to explain how we got there.

The people bit

After the call for participation, we wound up with 200 proposals in the system. From there, the target was to get down to 5 tutorials and 68 presentations.

Each proposal contains an abstract of at most 500 words. I enlisted a small army of reviewers (69 in all) to help, and assigned four or five reviewers to each abstract. 829 reviews were assigned in all. The reviewers work blind, so they don't get to see who the proposer is.

After the review, I read every score and proposal, and created a shortlist of the best scoring proposals plus those that had spuriously low scores given their quality. From this shortlist the hard graft of preparing a draft schedule started.

We had already decided in advance on our usual format: four parallel tracks of browsers, core tech, applications and open data. I then filled in the schedule, aiming to create themes for days, or at least for the 2-session blocks.

The draft schedule and details of those shortlisted but who missed the cut were circulated among the committee. After some iteration and feedback the final schedule emerged.

Picking tutorials was a little different, as this is done by myself and the committee directly. The constraints on choice are more commercially-oriented. Experience has shown we need mainstream topics that people will be happy to pay for. Even so, each year we try to include one emerging topic. Last year, it was Rails. This year, it's OpenStreetMap.

Choices made, I then notified the speakers, awaited their confirmation, and reached the point where we could publish the schedule.

The mechanics of it all

A glib reading of the above would make it all sound quite simple. And this year I'm pleased to report that it was a lot simpler than previous years. We have been able to use Expectnation from beginning to end, which has streamlined a lot of the work.

Expectnation's my super startup that's taking up the time that XTech and fatherhood don't! I'm about to tell you why it's wonderful, so please forgive a little pride.

Gathering the proposals was easy once the CFP had been set up inside Expectnation. I set up three calls: one for presentations, one for tutorials, and a secret one that the public doesn't get to see. (We always need a secret one for people who have very good reasons why they didn't make the public deadlines.)

The review phase

Recruiting reviewers was done by Expectnation's request system. This lets me send a request to a large number of people simultaneously, and collect their responses via the web app. (Previously, this had involved email, spreadsheets and wasted time.) The chart you see to the right shows the breakdown of the response to this request.

If a reviewer said 'yes', they added a note to say which types of proposal they would review, and signed up for an account in the system.

I then passed through every paper assigning four or five appropriate reviewers. A quick search each time allowed me to look for the right reviewers, and ensure no one reviewer got overloaded with work.

Once reviewers were assigned, I headed over to the Mailroom department. Expectnation has a large number of configurable mailing targets, one of which is "reviewers with work to do". I emailed each reviewer with details of how to get on with the reviewing.

Every reviewer then logged into Expectnation, saw the proposals they needed to review, and used the interface to efficiently score the proposals. One big lesson here is that it needs to be very efficient if you want to get the best reviewers, who are often the busiest.

Another wizzy graph enabled me to keep track of the reviews, and the mailroom let me send out a reminder to those reviewers who hadn't finished their work yet, when the time for the close of reviewing drew near.

Picking the papers

Expectnation lets me sort and filter proposals pretty flexibly, so I went through the papers for each track in turn, ordered by their review score. Anything scored 3 or higher (4 is best, 1 is worst) was almost certain to be shortlisted. I read all the reviews and the abstract, and moderated any score that was unusually low (for some reason, reviewers rarely overrate proposals!)

The next step was to set up the empty grid, shown in the top half of the diagram to the right. Here I added the empty time slots to the rooms we had, and assigned putative tracks to each of the rooms (they can be swapped around later if needed.)

After that, the scheduling can start, shown in the second half of the picture to the right. Each empty slot can be assigned a paper from the shortlist for the relevant topic. That way it's easy to "paint on" talks into each room and quickly get a sense for the overall flow of the conference.

Once it was time to finalize matters, I mass-marked all the scheduled papers as accepted, which automatically sent a notification to the presenters, using the same request system as for reviewers. When a speaker confirms, their proposal status changes and they appear in the final public grid. From there, I am able to use the mailroom again to inform speakers of the information they need to know. Additionally, speakers can log into the system at any time to see when they've been scheduled to speak.

Gridding out the conference in Expectnation is probably the biggest timesaver of all. Previously this involved a lot of sketching on paper or a spreadsheet, and a lot of manual work notifying people, and then more work creating the timetable to go on the web site. Now, both the grid and a full web of abstracts and speaker details are generated automatically.

What next?

As you can probably tell, I'm rather excited about both XTech 2007 and also about the work we're doing with Expectnation.

What's next for XTech is the process of publicising the conference among attendees, recruiting session moderators, and also the writing of papers by the presenters. As the conference draws nearer, the attendee-level interactive features of Expectnation will kick in, allowing personal scheduling and rating of sessions.

What's next for Expectnation is that we're ramping up to our 1.0 launch. We're working with a handful of early adopter customers right now, and are always interested in new use cases. As we get nearer the end of the first tranche of engineering work, we're going to gear up the publicity effort and start explaining to the world why we're special.

As usual, I'd love to hear questions, feedback and suggestions.

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Conference roundup: XTech, ETech, OSCON

2007-01-15T15:24:27Z

A brief update concerning the conferences with which I am involved.

XTech 2007, of which I'm chair, is progressing well. We've had a large number of submissions and the review process is proceeding apace. Speakers will be notified on February 2nd, and we hope to publish the schedule very soon after. Now's the time to think about joining us in Paris, May 15-18th.

The O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, aka ETech 2007, for which I'm a member of the program committee, is now open for registration. Be in San Diego this March to connect with the brightest cultivators of tomorrow's tech.

Also from O'Reilly, the 2007 Open Source Convention is now open for proposals. OSCON needs no introduction from me, I'm sure. I've been on the program committee for some years now, brooding over Linux, XML and other topics. Deadline for proposal submission is February 5th.

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