Archive: Posts about Blogging Conference
January 22nd, 2007, 20 Comments »
From the butt-ugly survey site I just created:
Why do you blog? Why do I blog? Why does anybody? As the medium enters its pubescence, it’s a question that I wonder about all the time. I’ve talked about it with a lot of different bloggers, and everyone offers a different reason.
In February, I’m giving a talk called “Why We Blog” at Northern Voice here in Vancouver. In preparation, I’m launching this ad hoc survey to gather more opinions and voices from the blogosphere.
The survey is 16 questions, and hopefully won’t take you more than 10 minutes. I really appreciate the time you might take to complete it. As a token of that appreciation, I’m giving away a few prizes:
- One randomly-selected person who completes the survey will win an iPod Shuffle.
- Another randomly-selected survey completer will win two Lonely Planet books–Micronations and Experimental Travel
- I obviously want to promote the survey, so I’m also giving away one CAN $50 gift certificate to a randomly-selected person who blogs about it. Just link to http://www.whydoyoublog.com and you’re qualified to win.
If you’re a blogger, or were a blogger, please consider taking or linking to this survey (link fixed). It’s past my bedtime, but tomorrow I’ll whip up a couple little web badges or banner things for it.
20 Comments »
January 18th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Each year, I help to organize Northern Voice. I’ve done a lot of event planning, we’ve got XML.com veteran Lauren Wood onboard, and there are plenty of organizers, so it’s never been particularly difficult.
That said, I think a lot of people find event planning really challenging. Consider, for example, all of the drama, trauma and infrastructure that surrounds planning something pretty straightforward and often rote–a wedding.
So, I was pleased to discover this exhaustive article on organizing a community technology conference by Jon Stahl. He apparently was involved with planning a Plone (an open source content management system) conference.
It’s essential to have a good, bright LCD projector for each room — at least 2000 lumens (preferably 2500 or more). Have at least one spare too.
An ideal venue will have LOTS of electrical outlets in the floor. If it doesn’t (and Seattle Center didn’t), you will want to buy LOTS of extension cords, power strips and high-quality gaffer’s tape (not duct tape!) to tape it all down. This will take several hours, and you’ll need a crew of volunteers.
Some of it is Plone-specific, but there’s lots of valuable general advice mixed in.
Judging from the photo, it was something of a sausage fest. I do like the idea of a huge group photo like that. Maybe we should do one for Northern Voice?
We did that with my Theatre Department–the Phoenix Theatres–back at UVic, and it was always fun. There was a tradition of yelling “one Phoenix photo, ha, ha, ha!” in the voice of Count Von Count. I wonder if they still do that.
While wondering about that, I happened upon this nice piece about my classmate Charles Ross–the One Man Star Wars Jedi master–returning to UVic for a few shows.
1 Comment »
January 12th, 2007, 1 Comment »
We’ve got some extra money this year in the Northern Voice coffers, and have decided to spend it on a travel bursary program:
This year Northern Voice is offering six travel bursaries of CAN $500 each. The organizing committee will be awarding these bursaries based on a number of criteria, including:
- The contributions you can make to the conference
- Your level of need
- The quality of your submission
- The diversity you might bring to Northern Voice
There was considerable debate among the organizers about how to divy up the money (3 at $1000? 10 at $300?), and what criteria to use in awarding it. We figured that $500 pays for your flight here from nearly anywhere in North America, and might help some people attend who otherwise couldn’t afford to.
Of course, if you live in Chilliwack but can make a strong enough case, we’d award one to you.
1 Comment »
December 14th, 2006, 7 Comments »
Last year I spoke at Les Blogs, a European Web 2.0 conference that’s been renamed Le Web 3. At this year’s conference, la merde a frappe le ventilateur because two French presidential candidates were snuck into the schedule at the last minute. They spoke in French, and apparently didn’t take questions. This irked a lot of attendees–Tom Raftery renamed the conference ‘Le Week’, though I think he means ‘Le Weak’.
Marc Snyder posted this photo courtesy of Companice, which seems to transcend language:
Robert links to Hugh McLeod’s more positive view of the conference:
I feel that the golden age of “The Blog Conference” is passed. It seems all that needs to be said about blogs has already been said, and said well. Now it’s time to stop talking about the blogs themselves, and start finding new stuff to do with them. Blogs are great, but real life is more interesting.
It’s an interesting point, and one I’m hyper-sensitive to regarding Northern Voice. Having a blogging conference is a bit like having an email conference–eventually everybody will get it, and the conference will naturally die off. I don’t think that time has come yet, judging by the continued popularity of our noobie sessions, and the fact that most people don’t know what RSS is yet.
Increasingly, we’re thinking of NV as a ‘personal publishing’ conference more than strictly blogging. This will become more apparent when we publish the schedule grid, which ought to be in the next few days. When the grid comes out, though, there will be no politicans on it. They’re welcome to attend, of course, and even give a Moose Camp (Friday’s unconference) session, but we’re an apolitical conference.
7 Comments »
December 6th, 2006, No Comments »
Today we had the annual selection meeting for Northern Voice speakers. We prepare as much as possible, but it’s always a marathon affair–today’s was a little under four hours.
This year’s selection process was the hardest ever because there were more submissions, and they were of a higher calibre. It’s a complicated process, because you’re trying to balance the demands the diverse attendees against the type of submissions you receive. And, of course, the diversity of submissions doesn’t necessarily map to the schedule we ultimately want.
Still, I’m really pleased with the schedule we came up with. It’s packed with stuff for both the noob and grizzled veteran, and is probably the broadest we’ve ever had.
We’ll be contacting all the speakers over the next couple of weeks, and make the schedule public as soon as we can.
No Comments »
November 29th, 2006, 1 Comment »
Frankly, all of us Northern Voice organizers have gotten behind the eight-ball a bit on this year’s conference. We all keep getting busier–we’re approaching some kind of busyness event horizon where we’ll just cease to exist.
Regardless, our ducks are back in a row. Here’s some conference news:
- We extended the speaker submission deadline to this Friday, December 1. The speaker submissions are coming in fast and furious now. Submit! You must submit.
- Registration is officially open! Two days of conference fun for CAN $50! How fun is it? Look what Will Pate (that old pirate) wrote: “Calling it a conference doesn’t do it justice, it’s more like a learning party.”
- Every year we make some nifty little badges that you can use to help share the joy that is Northern Voice. Unfortunately, the task fell to me this year, so I’m not sure how nifty they are. I heartily encourage any graphically-gifted keeners to make better moose-themed webby goodness (Rob, we’re talking to you). Here’s a big original, by the way, of the moose with iPod.
UPDATE: I’m running a quick survey to determine what colour t-shirts should be this year.
1 Comment »
October 20th, 2006, 5 Comments »
I’m a little late on this, as my fellow organizers Brian, Boris and Kris have already mentioned it, but Northern Voice 2007 is on!
Unfortunately, due to increased demand, UBC Robson Square was unavailable this year. We asked the community with a quick survey, and the response was that price mattered more than location. So, we’re out at UBC’s main campus this year at the Forest Sciences Centre.
No word of a lie: last December I was out at UBC for our Northern Voice speaker selection meeting, and met my sister for lunch. We met at the cafeteria in the Forest Sciences Centre, and I was blown away by the building. It has an enormous atrium, and really cool rooms. Check out Cyprien’s photos. So, while it’s a change from downtown, we’re super happy with the building out at UBC.
We have a barebones site up at the moment, and speaker submissions are officially open.
5 Comments »
February 13th, 2006, 7 Comments »
Or, at least that’s what they say on film sets. Here are some less random thoughts on what I think went right and wrong for our two-day conference.
Sessions
Though I saw few sessions on either day, it’s my impression that the Moose Camp sessions were decidedly mixed. Some were great, some were lame, some were highly interactive, some were lectures, some were free of ads, some were just thinly-veiled product pitches. That, I suppose, is what we get when offering a self-organizing conference. Next year (if there is one–we haven’t decided yet), we’ll have to discuss whether we can massage Moose Camp and foster a higher level of consistency in quality and format.
Saturday, on the other hand, seemed to be consistently as good or better than
last year. I’ve heard and read very few complaints about the sessions, and everybody
had lots of positive feedback. I had a lot of fun at the panel I sat on (So
They’re Threatening to Sue–Brian, how’d that audio turn out?), as well
as the one I moderated (Blogging,
Passion and Personal Expression). They both had a lot of back-and-forth
with the audience, and, you know, nobody got up and left in disgust. I’ll post
the audio to the first panel if it’s available, for I made an amusing verbal
gaffe that had me turning a little red. [more]
Read more…
7 Comments »
February 10th, 2006, 10 Comments »
It seems like recently I’ve been writing a lot of ‘quick thoughts’ posts. I expect it’s because I’ve been extra busy, and only have time for semi-random bulleted lists of observations. Apologies, and I’ll try to improve.
Today was Moose Camp, our somewhat experimental self-organizing conference added on to Northern Voice. Here are a few early observations:
- I need to improve the face-to-name mappings in my name. I worked the registration desk, and I probably had to ask five people their names when I should have already known them. It was horrifying.
- Registration went smoother this year, partially because we’d learned lessons from last year, and partially because it’s distributed over two days.
- There was a good community vibe throughout the day. The section of UBC Robson Square that we used was ideal for this sort of open model of conference.
- I hardly attended any sessions, but I solicited lots of feedback throughout the day. My early impressions are that the sessions varied from lousy to excellent. I suppose this is what you’d expect from self-selected speakers.
- Another recurring observation that I heard was that people would have liked more interactive sessions. We never mandated the format of the sessions–we didn’t want to be that prescriptive with Moose Camp–but we might consider doing so next year.
- I wonder if the diversity of attendees hurts the self-organizing conference. Depending upon who was speaking and what audience participation was like, I think the level of discourse varied. Jeffrey Simpson doesn’t exactly say why it got his goat, but I think I get the basic idea when he says “devolved into arguments about technical details between the speakers and members of the audience, but it was the more abstract philosophical ones that sort of got my goat.”
- Best joke of the day was during the wrap-up, where each speaker offered a 30-second summary of their session. Somebody (I missed who) was talking about being from the mainstream media, and how they were starting to get blogging. Then somebody else yelled from the crowd ‘let’s get him!’ and somebody else yelled ‘burn him!’. Hee hee.
- More reaction from around the blogosphere, and zillions of photos are appearing on Flickr. This is probably my favourite: cutest volunteers ever.
As a footnote, here’s a simple but insidious example of tag spam. This asshat just looked at the most popular Flickr tags of the day and week, and associated them with his totally unrelated photo. This is why tags are a lousy kludge.
10 Comments »
February 9th, 2006, No Comments »
Just a quick note to mention a late addition to the Moose Camp roster. Sarah Pullman, yoga instructor and aspiring geek, is running a Yoga for Moose Campers session over lunchtime (11:30am to 1pm) tomorrow.
I mention this because I’m a satisfied customer, having participated in today’s Yoga for Geeks session at OSCMS. It was my first time at yoga, and Sarah was gentle with me and the other neophytes. As it turns out, I’m only any good at corpse pose.
I may not be as satisfied tomorrow, as unused muscles ache in protest at 7:00am while I’m setting up. When is the Massage for Moose Campers session?
No Comments »
