Articles tagged as 'expectnation' from Edd Dumbill, technology writer and free software hacker. http://times.usefulinc.com/tagexpectnation 2008-07-01T16:00:17Z http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/07/01-oscon-sked We've switched on personal schedule sharing on the OSCON web site. linux expectnation conferences oscon Edd Dumbill 2008-07-01T15:58:59Z <p>We've switched on personal schedule sharing on the <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/">OSCON web site</a>.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Here's <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/share/71df5978de24b9ae2289b47712bf042c">my personal schedule</a>. In it you'll find all the <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/topic/Keynote">plenary sessions</a> (as co-chair I simply cannot miss these, and neither should you, however late the party!)</p> <p>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: <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3098">Prophet</a>, <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/2491">female participation in open source</a>, <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/2383">Clutter</a>, and of course <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3373">Erlang</a>.</p> <p>I'm fascinated to find out what other people have got planned, so please publish your schedules too and let's compare notes.</p><p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/07/01-oscon-sked#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/06/02-railsconf I couldn't make it to RailsConf this year, but have been playing my part from afar. rails railsconf expectnation conferences Edd Dumbill 2008-06-02T12:01:03Z <p>I couldn't make it to <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/">RailsConf</a> 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 <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a>, which is of course Rails-based.</p> <p>Here's a badge I clipped for my virtual scrapbook.</p> <p><img src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/43/dhh.png" alt="DHH's badge" width="504" height="166" /></p><p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/06/02-railsconf#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/05/23-updates Back from my travels, it's time for a few updates. I've mostly blogged about these elsewhere, so I'll just give some pointers here. xtech linux xml web expectnation Edd Dumbill 2008-05-23T14:11:10Z <p>Back from my travels, it's time for a few updates. I've mostly blogged about these elsewhere, so I'll just give some pointers here.</p> <p>The <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/public/content/2008/05/22-reg-and-lead-retrieval">launch of magnetic-stripe cards</a> at Where 2.0 went well.</p> <p>We had some initial teething issues with Linux talking to the card printers, which was resolved by backing down to Linux kernel 2.6.22 from 2.6.24. I'm not entirely sure what's up with 2.6.24, but it exhibited strange behavior talking to the card printers over ethernet &mdash; as if there were MTU misconfigurations. It's a big nuisance, as 2.6.24 is the default kernel shipped with Ubuntu Hardy, an otherwise excellent release.</p> <p>I've been paying some attention to OpenID 2.0 recently, as it's time for me to upgrade my OpenID accepting websites to use the new release of the specification &mdash; if for no other reason than Yahoo! OpenIDs are 2.0-only.</p> <p>This investigation led me to notice XRIs again, which are the confusing underbelly of the OpenID specs. The W3C Technical Architecture Group recently advised against using XRIs. I <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/05/xris_bad_uris_good.html">wrote about this</a>&nbsp;over on my XML.com blog.</p> <p>I've not used for that blog for a long time, but will try to do so more. I've realized that I've still got a lot to say about the web, XML and open standards, and the XML.com blog seems like a good place to say it.</p> <p>Finally, to brag for a short moment. Another <a href="http://2008.xtech.org/">XTech</a>&nbsp;has been and gone, and this year's was a great experience for everybody involved. This quote <a href="http://paulsmith.blogs.ilrt.org/2008/05/19/xtech-2008-day-3/">from attendee Paul Smith</a> summed things up nicely, as it tells me I succeeded in my main goal for the conference:</p> <blockquote>What I really liked about this conference was the mix of attendees and presenters, both from academia, and the commercial world both and small. It made it feel much more valid, and it really felt like everyone was there for the right reasons - not trying to sell anything, but out of a genuinely altruistic wish to make the web better.</blockquote> <p>My sincere thanks to everybody involved in XTech this year.</p><p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/05/23-updates#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/05/02-travel My next two jaunts; Dublin for XTech and San Francisco for Where 2.0 xtech expectnation conferences Edd Dumbill 2008-05-02T17:14:04Z <p>About to go off travelling again.</p> <p>Next week is of course <a href="http://2008.xtech.org/">XTech 2008</a>, so I'll be in Dublin with some of the smartest people working in web technology today. The <a href="http://2008.xtech.org/public/schedule/full">schedule</a> looks fantastic, and we've still got proposals coming in for the <a href="http://2008.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/654">Lightning Talks</a>, which promise to be highly entertaining and informative.</p> <p>If you didn't yet book, don't worry that you missed the online registration deadline, you can still register on-site.</p> <h3>Where 2.0</h3> <p>After XTech, it's straight to San Francisco (well, Burlingame) for the O'Reilly <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/where2008">Where 2.0</a> conference. Although I'm interested in the conference, my main reason for going is that <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">we're</a> launching a new addition to our onsite check-in system: magnetic stripe conference badges.</p> <p>Here's a <a href="http://assets.expectnation.com/1/eventprovider/1/where_badge.png">proof image of my badge</a>.</p> <p><img src="http://assets.expectnation.com/1/eventprovider/1/where_badge.png" alt="Badge proof for Where 2.0" width="499" height="160" /></p> <p>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 <a href="http://www.arduino.cc/">Arduino</a> is so popular.</p> <p>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 <a href="http://www.evolis.com/">Evolis</a> range of printers has CUPS drivers too.</p><p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/05/02-travel#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/04/01-going-solo Stephanie Booth's Going Solo conference, coming up in May this year in Lausanne, is aimed at freelancers and self-employed people in the internet industry. expectnation conferences work Edd Dumbill 2008-04-01T09:34:17Z <p>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.</p> <p>This is why I'm really happy to see Stephanie Booth's <a href="http://going-solo.net/">Going Solo</a> 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.</p> <p>I'll end with quoting from a recent posting of Stephanie's, <a href="http://going-solo.net/2008/03/30/a-theory-about-freelancers-in-the-internet-industry/">A Theory About Freelancers in the Internet Industry</a>. This struck a chord with me, and is what makes me think Going Solo is going to be an excellent event.</p> <blockquote> <p style="color: #656565; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;">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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s common for the soloist to feel lost and isolated.</p> <p style="color: #656565; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;">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.</p> </blockquote> <div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://going-solo.net/"><img src="http://climbtothestars.org/files/going-solo/going-solo-badge-180px-wide.gif" alt="Going Solo conference for freelancers, May 16th, Lausanne (Switzerland)." /></a></div> <p>(Note: My conference software company,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a>, 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&nbsp;<a href="http://conferences.oreilly.com/">larger customers</a>.)</p> <div><br /></div><p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/04/01-going-solo#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/11/14-latest The guilty catch-up obligatory before continuing to blog further. rails railsconf expectnation family conferences Edd Dumbill 2007-11-14T16:03:04Z <p>I&rsquo;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&rsquo;s been going on.</p> <h3>Expectnation</h3> <p>Most of my time&rsquo;s been spent working on <a href="http://expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a>, the conference and event management application my company works on.</p> <p>The highlight of this quarter is that we launched <a href="http://expectnation.com/public/content/registration">registration facilities</a>, 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.</p> <p>We&rsquo;re very excited about adding this, and it makes Expectnation the ideal &ldquo;conference in a box&rdquo; system.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s a complete buzz to see submissions coming in for <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/content/home">RailsConf</a> using our software&mdash;Rails-based, of course!</p> <h3>Conferences</h3> <p>I&rsquo;m currently gearing up to open the call for participation for XTech 2008. We&rsquo;ll be in Dublin, Ireland, in early May 2008. More soon on this front.</p> <p>Additionally, I&rsquo;m going to be co-chair with Allison Randal for O&rsquo;Reilly&rsquo;s <span class="caps">OSCON 2008</span>. I can&rsquo;t really say I&rsquo;m filling Nat Torkington&rsquo;s shoes (more like ironing <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/x180/898259595/in/set-72157600967110580/">his shirts</a>) but needless to say it&rsquo;s a great privilege about which I&rsquo;m thoroughly excited.</p> <div style="margin: 2em; float: right"><img width="350" height="263" src="/asset/name/40/k-read.jpg" alt="Katherine reading" /></div> <p>With being so busy, I&rsquo;ve not had the time to travel as nearly as much as I&rsquo;d like this year (the small matter of the baby twins has some bearing on this, too). I&rsquo;m very sad to be missing <a href="http://2007.xmlconference.org"><span class="caps">XML 2007</span></a>, as the <span class="caps">XML</span> crowd remains the most erudite, eclectic and friendly bunch of people I&rsquo;ve ever had the pleasure to work with.</p> <h3>Writing</h3> <p>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 <a href="http://www.simonstl.com/">Simon St.Laurent</a>. All hush-hush for now, but I look forward to sharing the news and maybe some early-access content here.</p> <p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/11/14-latest#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/06/22-disclosure Asking for too much information from users is a barrier to participation. So, we invented a way to make sure that users only get asked for as much as we need to know. programming rails expectnation community Edd Dumbill 2007-06-22T15:37:46Z <p>Web applications are in constant competition for a user's attention. Unlike shrink-wrap software, there's often no captive audience, and web apps must gently guide and woo users to help them to the best experience of the software.</p> <p>This is particularly true when considering the problem of collecting personal details from a user. Collect too little information, and your app might not be able to function effectively. Collect too much information, and you raise the barrier for participation with your application. Users may either not be bothered, be alarmed at the apparent intrusion into their privacy, or fill out bogus information.&nbsp;</p> <h3>One size doesn't fit all<br /> </h3> <p>I originally stumbled on the issue in the development of <a href="http://expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a>. The amount of information a conference speaker needs to give the organizers is significantly more than that of, say, a reviewer. An organizer will often want postal and phone details for a speaker, which are largely irrelevant to the review process. All conferences and events rely on the willingess of participants, so the path to participation needs to be as frictionless as possible.<br /></p> <p>Thus, a one-size-fits-all personal details form didn't make sense for us. At best, we could have simply made more fields optional, but that would result in missing information that we really did need.</p> <p>Another solution would be to provide a dedicated personal details form per user type, e.g. different forms for speakers and reviewers. This is a non-starter, however, as users can take on many roles within a conference.</p> <p>So, we had a problem on our hands: different levels of interaction with our application requires different levels of personal information.</p> <p>We also had a second problem, which is that not all events and organizers want the same level of information. For example, a user group event is unlikely to need the same amount of information from speakers as an academic conference.</p> <p>Thus we have two axes on which the amount of information required varies: by role, and by event.&nbsp;</p> <h3>Our solution: progressive disclosure</h3> <p>We concluded that we wanted to adhere to two principles in the collection of user information for Expectnation:</p> <ul> <li>collect as little information from users as possible, and<br /> </li> <li>allow organizers to determine the level of information they wish to collect.</li> </ul> The first objective was achieved by constructing a matrix of information items against user role, with the possible values of {required, optional, unused} for each item. We then achieved the second objective by allowing this matrix to be varied over each event. <p>We've named this concept &quot;<a href="http://expectnation.com/public/content/2007/06/21-tip-user-disclosure">progressive disclosure</a>.&quot;</p> <p>What this means in practice is that a user is only ever asked for the information required to fulfil the roles they have within Expectnation. If they take on another role, they are asked for the additional information at that point, and not before.</p> <h3>Implementation concerns</h3> <p style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; text-align: center"><img width="341" height="229" src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/39/small-disc.jpg" alt="Expectnation user disclosure editing" /><br />Extract from disclosure level editing UI</p> <p>It would be untrue to say that progressive disclosure is simple to implement.</p> <p>A user in our system will have disclosure requirements that are the union of all of their roles in all of the events they attend. Within Ruby on Rails, this means the conventional validation logic is useless to us, as it only deals with static requirements. Secondly, disclosure requirements are expensive to compute, so we need to cache them, with the inevitable addition of issues such as cache invalidation.</p> <p>Beyond the data model issues, the user interface issues are, if anything, more troublesome. From an end-user's point of view, the difficulty arises when we need extra information from them, and presenting this in a way that makes sense.</p> <p>From the event organizer's point of view, we have the challenge of presenting a controlling user interface for rather a complex concept. Organizers must be able to change the level of required information either globally, or per-event.</p> <p>We opted for a grid presentation, an extract from which is shown in the screenshot in this article. Over time we'll be able to see how effective this interface is, and what we can do to improve it.</p> <p>Finally, we have chosen sensible defaults for all disclosure levels, as the best result would be that organizers have little need to reconfigure the settings in the first place.</p> <h3>Making it look easy</h3> <p>Because Expectnation is a general application for organizing events, rather than targetting one specific one, we've had to construct a framework for minimizing user information collection, as opposed to simple implementation of known scenarios.</p> <p>At the end of the day we have added a fairly complicated subsystem and an extra degree of complexity to our codebase. However, the result from the user's point of view is increased simplicity and a streamlined experience.</p> <p>Every time you embark on something that wide-reaching and complex, you have to ask yourself whether the feature is really worth it. In this case, though, the answer is a resounding &quot;yes&quot;. The user is the most important factor in our software, and making their life easier in an unobtrusive manner is a priority.</p> <ul> <li>Expectnation blog: <a href="http://expectnation.com/public/content/2007/06/21-tip-user-disclosure">Only ask users for the information you need</a></li> </ul> <br /> <p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/06/22-disclosure#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/06/14-unconferences Discussing how Expectnation can be made even more useful to ad-hoc conferences. expectnation conferences barcamp Edd Dumbill 2007-06-14T17:45:07Z <p>My latest venture, <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a>, is conference management software aimed primarily at the traditional form of running conferences. The schedule, speakers and topics are all lined up in advance.</p> <p style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; text-align: center"><img width="394" height="250" alt="Foo Camp" src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/38/foocamp.jpg" style="border-bottom: 0.5em none" /><br /><em>Campers at O'Reilly's Foo Camp unconference</em></p> <p>However, many conferences now are taking the form of &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference">unconferences</a>&quot; in whole or part, exemplified by the <a href="http://barcamp.org/">BarCamp</a> movement. At these events, the schedule is assembled just in time, and almost everybody is a presenter.</p> <p>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 &quot;one-stop shop&quot; tool for conventional conference structures, and we want to do it for BarCamps and unconferences too.</p> <h3>Tell me what you need&nbsp;</h3> <p>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.</p><p>The sort of subject areas I'm keen to hear about include</p><ul><li>registration,</li><li>attendee social networking,</li><li>documenting the event,</li><li>tools already in use, and their effectiveness.</li></ul><p>If you have views on this, please join the <a href="http://forums.expectnation.com/viewtopic.php?id=22">discussion thread over on the forums</a>. It's worth restating too that I'm very keen to talk about this with attendees as well as organizers.</p><p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/06/14-unconferences#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/06/01-expectnation For the last 18 months, I've been hard at work with Expectnation. Now it's live! software web expectnation conferences Edd Dumbill 2007-06-01T15:04:46Z <p>I'm very pleased to announce the launch of <a href="http://expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a>, a web application for managing conferences.</p> <p style="float: right; margin-left: 15px"><img width="218" height="46" src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/37/enation-logo.png" alt="Expectnation logo" /></p> <h3>What does it do?</h3> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Our tagline is &quot;build your conference into a community&quot;, 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.<br /> </p> <p>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.</p> <h3>Take a look&nbsp;</h3> <p>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.</p> <p>So, if you organize, speak at, or attend conferences of any sort, please check out <a href="http://expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a> and recommend it to a conference organizer near you!</p><p><strong>Related links</strong></p><ul><li><a href="http://expectnation.com/public/content/website">Expectnation tour</a> complete with screenshots <br /></li><li><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/tag/expectnation">Previous posts</a> I've written about Expectnation</li><li><a href="http://2007.xtech.org/">XTech 2007</a> was completely managed inside Expectnation&nbsp;</li></ul> <p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/06/01-expectnation#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/05/16-xtech-heatmaps Simple visualisation to help conference organizers. xtech expectnation visualization Edd Dumbill 2007-05-16T15:16:57Z <p>One of the fun and useful things we've been able to do in <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a> with the <a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/05/11-xtech">personal scheduler</a> is to use the data to help us as organizers.</p> <p>We recently added in dynamic overlays to the organizer's view of the schedule, enabling us to create heatmaps of the most popular talks.</p> <p style="text-align: center"><img width="184" height="424" alt="Heatmap" src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/35/heatmap.png" title="Heatmap" /><br />Screenshot of personal scheduler popularity overlaid on event timetable</p> <p>As well as satisfying natural curiosity, the heatmaps let us identify issues such as possible room overcrowding in advance.</p> <p>We're able also to record actual attendance figures as the conference goes on, and I will try and make an analysis of how attendees' intentions stack up against their actions.&nbsp;</p> <p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/05/16-xtech-heatmaps#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/05/11-xtech News of the XTech browser summit and personal scheduler. xtech web expectnation Edd Dumbill 2007-05-11T16:53:19Z <p>It's been a long time since I last wrote, mostly because we've been pulling out all the stops for <a href="http://2007.xtech.org/">XTech</a>.</p> <p>Next week is set to be stimulating and challenging. I'm amazed at the collection of thinkers and innovators we've drawn together, and am looking forward to getting a boost of energy and inspiration from the conference.<br /> </p> <h3>Browser summit</h3> <p>On Tuesday next week, <a href="http://molly.com/">Molly Holzschlag</a> and I are sponsoring a <a href="http://2007.xtech.org/public/content/2007/05/10-browser-summit">Web Browser, Standards and Interop Summit</a>. This is an opportunity for browser vendors, standards advocates, W3C and related standards supporters to talk in a vendor (and standards-body) neutral atmosphere about tackling the problem of browser interoperability.</p> <p>As the <a href="http://2007.xtech.org/public/content/2007/05/10-browser-summit">full announcement</a> mentions, we're also throwing open the doors to interested bloggers and journalists to get involved in and cover the discussion.</p> <p>The summit came about after Molly and I got talking about our desire to provide a forum for effective exchange between the people shaping the future of HTML. This is something that spawned the vision of the Browser Track and XTech in the first place three years ago.</p> <p>I don't know how much we'll solve at the first summit, but it puts down a marker and a challenge for participation. I am not the only one concerned at the increasing fragmentation of the HTML landscape, the breakdown in communication, and the ultimate ill-effects for web developers and users.</p> <h3>Personal scheduler and evaluations</h3> <p>As my conference software <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a> nears its public launch, we'll be using some of its fun features at XTech. Normally, the bulk of the work is done behind the scenes, so it's nice to have a feature to show off to attendees and the wider public.</p> <p><img width="195" hspace="8" height="163" align="right" src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/34/psched.png" alt="Personal scheduler" title="Personal scheduler" /></p> <p>The personal scheduling feature lets you compose your own timetable for the conference, just by clicking on the stars throughout the schedule. As a bonus, you can subscribe to your personal schedule as iCal, allowing you to take it with you on your phone or PDA.</p> <p>In addition, we'll be allowing attendees to submit evaluations of sessions online. If you're using the personal scheduler, it gets even neater as you can quickly find links to submit your evaluations, and review ones you've already submitted.</p> <p>Behind the scenes, I can see which sessions are the most popular and get advance warning if we're likely to need to move rooms to avoid overcrowding.</p> <p>I'm pretty excited about this. Features like this aren't exactly new, but now we've made them a standard feature for every conference. We're looking forward to adding more social software facilities to enhance the conference experience.</p><p><img width="444" height="246" title="Submitting session evaluations" alt="Submitting session evaluations" src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/33/eval.png" />&nbsp;</p> <p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/05/11-xtech#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/03/06-sparklines A brief survey of XTech voting patterns as illustrated by sparklines. xtech expectnation visualization Edd Dumbill 2007-03-06T15:34:10Z <p>In a <a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/02/23-xtech">recent article</a> I explained some of the mechanics behind putting together the schedule for <a href="http://2007.xtech.org/">XTech 2007</a>. We've just added new visualization features to <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a> that make proposal choice easier, and I thought I'd show some examples from the XTech 2007 review voting.</p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline">Sparklines</a>, devised by Edward Tufte, are thumbnail sketches of data that succinctly convey patterns. When Nat Torkington used sparklines to show reviewer voting patterns for OSCON program committee, it seemed a helpful addition to make to Expectnation.</p> <p>The profile of each reviewer is interesting &mdash; are they a harsh marker, or liberal with the top grades? &mdash; but sparklines really come into their own when drawn per proposal. Here are some small screenshots from this year's XTech voting, anonymized of course.<br /></p> <h3>High flyers</h3> <p><img width="185" height="15" alt="High scoring chart" src="/asset/name/24/high-1.png" /></p> <p>Reviewers are pretty unanimous about this proposal, as 4.0 is the top grade in our scoring system. The lack of variance suggests that I ought to ensure that all the assigned reviewers put in their scores &mdash; this could be just one person voting.&nbsp;</p> <p><img width="185" height="15" alt="High scoring chart" src="/asset/name/25/high-2.png" /></p> <p><img width="185" height="15" alt="High scoring chart" src="/asset/name/26/high-3.png" /></p> <p>These next two are the pretty typical distribution for highly graded proposals: mostly top marks and a few average ones.&nbsp;</p> <h3>Middle ranking</h3><p>Some of the more interesting trends show up when the scoring isn't biased to either the top or bottom ends of the scale.&nbsp;</p> <p><img width="185" height="15" src="/asset/name/30/medium-1.png" alt="Medium scoring chart" /></p><p>The reviewers are unanimous about this paper's soundness. It's not made anyone go &quot;wow&quot;, but there's nothing to grumble about either.&nbsp;</p> <p><img width="185" height="15" src="/asset/name/31/medium-2.png" alt="Medium scoring chart" /></p><p>This proposal clearly polarises opinion, and is such stands a better chance than the unanimous 3.0 above. Perhaps the subject matter or approach is controversial or timely.<br /></p> <p><img width="185" height="15" src="/asset/name/32/medium-3.png" alt="Medium scoring chart" /></p><p>Another proposal that divides the reviewers' opinions. It's also worth me checking here that I don't either have a pathologically strict reviewer, or at the other end, a reviewer with a wild passion for the cause this paper advocates.&nbsp;</p> <h3>Low scoring</h3> <p>The quality of submissions is usually so good that I don't give low graded proposals much attention, but the sparklines could alert me to potential oversights.&nbsp;</p><p><img width="185" height="15" src="/asset/name/27/low-1.png" alt="Low scoring chart" /></p><p>This proposal seems to polarise opinion between &quot;rubbish&quot; and &quot;ok&quot;, so it's interesting to me to check out the subject matter and see if I'm missing something with potential.&nbsp;</p> <p><img width="185" height="15" src="/asset/name/28/low-2.png" alt="Low scoring chart" /></p> <p><img width="185" height="15" src="/asset/name/29/low-3.png" alt="Low scoring chart" /></p> <p>These proposals were not received at all well.</p><p>In summary, I'm delighted to find a solid practical application for sparklines. My thanks to Nat Torkington for the inspiration.&nbsp;</p> <p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/03/06-sparklines#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/02/27-openid-uformats Two useful new additions to the Expectnation conference system: decentralized identity support and easy ways to integrate the schedule with your calendar xtech semweb expectnation openid microformats Edd Dumbill 2007-02-27T10:08:42Z <p>Thanks in no small part to the advocacy of <a href="http://simonwillison.net/">Simon Willison</a>, I've just <a href="http://openid.net/">OpenID</a>-enabled the <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/">XTech</a> web site.</p> <p style="float: right; margin-left: 8px"><img width="196" height="195" src="/asset/name/22/enation-openid.png" alt="OpenID log in box on Expectnation" /> </p> <p>Users can now create their accounts using an OpenID, or associate an OpenID with an existing account.</p> <p>A single-sign on solution like OpenID solves an important problem for us, as most people tend to interact with our conference web sites in only one or two time periods each year. While we've gone to the trouble of making retrieving a password easy, there's still the mental burden on the user of setting up the account and noting it down somewhere.</p> <p>As a measure of the impact of this on me personally: I habitually save registration confirmation emails in a certain mail folder. Since 1997 I have collected no fewer than 572 of these, and I'm sure some have been missed!</p> <p>One other cool thing about OpenID is that finally I can get the identity I wish to have. No longer do I have to be a compulsive early adopter of every service just to get the name <em>edd</em>. (Well, as long as said service integrates OpenID of course!) Personal branding is an important attractive aspect of OpenID.</p><h3>Implementation</h3><p>Implementing OpenID using the Ruby <em>ruby-openid</em> gem was quite straightforward, as was the logical integration into our user models. I've not been the only one following this path recently, as illustrated by <a href="http://www.danwebb.net/2007/2/27/the-no-shit-guide-to-supporting-openid-in-your-applications">this post on Rails OpenID integration</a> from Dan Webb.</p><p>The harder problem of deploying OpenID lies in making the user interface work well: ultimately that will have a huge influence over its uptake.</p> <p>We've made a decent first go of it in <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a>, but I'm sure we'll evolve and improve it over time. The main puzzling thing is how obvious to make the OpenID facility, given its relatively small take-up right now. We don't want to confuse normal users too much by using it.</p> <h3>Microformats</h3> <p>When I did my <a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/02/23-xtech">behind-the-scenes piece</a> on the building of the XTech schedule last week, one feature I didn't discuss was the support for <a href="http://microformats.org/">microformats</a> we have in the schedule and on the session pages. If you use a tool such as <a href="http://labs.mozilla.com/2006/12/introducing-operator">Operator</a>, you can easily save talk times to your calendar while reading the schedule.<br /></p> <p style="text-align: center"><img width="404" height="274" src="/asset/name/23/microformats.png" alt="XTech schedule microformats" /></p> <p>I'm personally a little late to the microformats party. Being a fan of pragmatic RDF, I didn't see much need for microformats right away. However, with tools like Operator I can honestly say that the use of microformats does enhance the XTech schedule.</p><p>My impressions of microformats (in particular hCalendar and hCard) from using them are mixed. One the plus side, it was very easy to do. On the negative side, I found them restrictive in the sense that for the metadata to be present in the hCalendar object, it needs to be part of the HTML presentation.</p><p>So, while microformats are meant to be about making human readable data useful for computers, they can have a tail-wagging effect on the human markup. Let me elaborate.</p><p> In the conference schedule there is a grid overview. For readability here we want to keep the details down to a minimum in each box. There is definitely no need to repeat the date of each presentation when you can see there's a grid per day.</p><p>But also we want to have microformats available in the page so users can use the grid to pick off talks to add to their calendar. The only details you currently get from the microformat are those you physically include inside the <em>div</em> marked as <em>vevent</em>. This means we can't embed the full details, such as the talk description. It also means I indulge in some dubious markup practices (an empty <em>abbr</em> element) in order to get the date and time into each hCalendar object.</p><p>It seems to me that this could be ameliorated by more intelligent user agent behaviour. Each of my hCalendar events is given a URL. At the end of that URL is a full description of the event, using microformats. So, as long as I reference the URL in a summary page, the user agent can beetle off and pull down the full information, in much the same sort of way that <a href="http://www.foaf-project.org/">FOAF</a> uses the <em>rdfs:seeAlso</em> property.</p><p>So, remove the expectation that microformats provide complete data, and I'm sold.</p><h3>Other schedule features: iCal, Upcoming.org<br /></h3><p>Of course, we have iCalendar support in the XTech <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/schedule">schedule</a>, so you can subscribe conventionally using iCal, Evolution or a similar program. <a href="http://www.aaronstraupcope.com/">Aaron Straup Cope</a> took the iCalendar, and uploaded each event into Upcoming.org. If you look at the <a href="http://upcoming.org/tag/xtech07/">upcoming events tagged xtech07</a>, you see the results of his work.</p><p>This foreshadows some of the social elements we plan to add to Expectnation itself: indicating your intent to attend a talk, and adding comments to it. As a program chair I'm finding this quite fascinating to watch.<br /></p> <p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/02/27-openid-uformats#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/02/23-xtech The building of the XTech 2007 schedule. xtech expectnation conferences Edd Dumbill 2007-02-23T15:10:00Z <p>After a couple of months' hard work, I've <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/schedule/grid">posted the schedule for XTech 2007</a>. And, though I say so myself, it looks good.</p> <p style="float: right; margin-left: 8px"><a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/schedule/grid"><img width="304" height="270" border="0" src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/19/grid.png" alt="XTech 2007 grid" /></a> </p> <p>You can read more about the schedule itself <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/content/2007/02/22-schedule-posted">over on the XTech web site</a>, but I thought it would be interesting to explain how we got there.</p> <h3>The people bit&nbsp;</h3> <p>After the <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/cfp/1">call for participation</a>, we wound up with 200 proposals in the system. From there, the target was to get down to 5 tutorials and 68 presentations.</p> <p>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.<br /> </p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/schedule/detail/185">OpenStreetMap</a>.<br /> </p> <p>Choices made, I then notified the speakers, awaited their confirmation, and reached the point where we could publish the schedule.</p> <h3>The mechanics of it all</h3> <p>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 <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a> from beginning to end, which has streamlined a lot of the work.&nbsp;</p> <p> 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.<br /> </p> <p>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.)</p> <p style="float: right; margin-left: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px"><img width="218" height="210" alt="Request response" src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/20/Picture_27.png" /></p> <h4>The review phase</h4> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Once reviewers were assigned, I headed over to the Mailroom department. Expectnation has a large number of configurable mailing targets, one of which is &quot;reviewers with work to do&quot;. I emailed each reviewer with details of how to get on with the reviewing.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <h4>Picking the papers</h4> <p style="float: right; margin-left: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px"><img width="217" height="247" alt="Gridding out XTech 2007" src="/asset/name/21/gridding.png" /></p> <p>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!)</p> <p>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.)</p> <p>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 &quot;paint on&quot; talks into each room and quickly get a sense for the overall flow of the conference.</p> <p>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 <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/schedule/grid">public grid</a>. 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.<br /> </p> <p>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 <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/schedule/full">full web of abstracts and speaker details</a> are generated automatically.</p> <h3>What next?</h3> <p>As you can probably tell, I'm rather excited about both XTech 2007 and also about the work we're doing with Expectnation.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>As usual, I'd <a href="mailto:edd-web@usefulinc.com">love to hear</a> questions, feedback and suggestions.</p> <p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/02/23-xtech#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2006/12/20-xtech-deadline Douglas Adams may have loved the sound of them as they whooshed by, but a conference organizer can't live without them. xtech expectnation Edd Dumbill 2006-12-20T12:40:49Z <p>Here is a graph showing the number of proposals sent in for <a href="http://2007.xtech.org/">XTech 2007</a> over the last two weeks.</p> <p><img width="379" height="228" alt="Proposals submitted for XTech" src="http://times.usefulinc.com/asset/name/16/xtech-graph.png" title="Proposals submitted for XTech" /></p><p>The actual deadline date is the highest bar. The Monday after, when everybody realised they'd missed the deadline, is the second highest bar. Of course, it's an open secret that tech conferences regularly extend their deadlines to account for such things. I am probably stricter than most programme chairs in this respect.<br /></p><p>This year we <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/content/2006/12/20-cfp-over">got over 200 proposals</a>. That means over three proposals to each slot, so choosing's going to be tough.</p><p>This graph is one of the bits of helpful eye candy <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">ExpectNation</a> gives me. As the conference organization proceeds I'll publish some other interesting details about the inner workings of XTech.</p><p>Meanwhile, I'm overwhelmed as usual with the quality of conference submissions, and will enjoy the task of reading each one this week.&nbsp;</p> <p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2006/12/20-xtech-deadline#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p> http://times.usefulinc.com/2006/11/02-xtech-cfp I've just published the call for participation for XTech 2007. Hurry there now and get involved! xtech expectnation Edd Dumbill 2006-11-02T19:34:24Z <p>I've just published the <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/content/2006/10/31-cfp-open">call for participation</a> for <a href="http://2007.xtech.org/">XTech 2007</a>.</p><p>The theme for this year&rsquo;s conference is &ldquo;The Ubiquitous Web&rdquo;. As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to be connected with the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own.</p><p>XTech will have its usual <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/content/tracks">four tracks</a>: <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/content/tracks#apps">Applications</a>, <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/content/tracks#browser">Browser Technologies</a>, <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/content/tracks#core">Core Technology</a>, <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/content/tracks#opendata">Open Data</a>. Keynotes addresses will be given by Adam Greenfield, author of &ldquo;Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing&rdquo;, Gavin Starks of Global Cool and designers of the future Matt Webb and Jack Schulze.</p><p>Head over to the <a href="http://xtech.expectnation.com/event/1/public/cfp">call pages</a> and submit your proposal. The deadline is 15 December 2006. The conference itself is in Paris, France, 15-18 May 2007.<br /></p><p><strong>Expectnation</strong></p><p>The publication of the XTech call is doubly exciting for me. XTech 2007 will be the first conference to be managed completely from <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a>, the software I've been building over the course of the last year.</p><p>Expectnation is a web-based system for managing conferences and training events. Right now we're conducting tests with some customers, and are working hard on readying the system for a public trial.</p><p>The particular strengths of Expectnation include the management of speakers, proposals and delegates. If you would like to stay informed of our progress, there's a place to sign up for news on the <a href="http://www.expectnation.com/">Expectnation</a> home page.</p><p><a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2006/11/02-xtech-cfp#disqus_thread">Join the conversation about this post</a></p>