B. Mann Consulting

I just wrapped up my presentation at the CCI2008. Here's the slideshare for it:

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A much longer post is up at Raincity Studios.

See you all on the other side of the weekend, I'm going completely offline...

Yes, Northern Voice 2008 is up and rolling!

We're currently looking for both speaker submissions and speaker ideas. I think I can honestly say that I'm at a bit of a loss on thinking about what the new new is. Or perhaps it is time to just refine and expand on previous threads and ideas? I do know that my thinking about geolocation was ahead of the curve from last year...I don't even think we'll quite be there for this year.

What *will* be there? Lots of interesting people. How to's and getting started in various areas, from blogs to wikis to digital photos. Open and participatory discussions, and all sorts of fruitful hallway conversations and ad hoc meetings. Some parties, some travel bursaries. High bandwidth tech-people-idea overload. Looking forward to it, and hope you'll join us.

Here are the obligatory Facebook and Upcoming events that you can show your attendance with -- we'll be opening official registration in a couple of weeks.

Today is the last (extended) day for speaker submissions for Northern Voice 2007. We'd love to have your thoughts and submissions -- the last minute rush to enter submissions has led to a fabulous selection that is going to be hard to choose from.

The organizers are meeting next week to fight tooth and nail for their favourite entries. In the mean time, registration is open, so you can go ahead and get your tickets now. We've got slightly more room than in past years, but we've sold out every year so far...

And what about Boris' traditional Northern Voice crazy plans? Well, we're still debating, but I might get to put together a geocaching / GPS adventure. We'll start it as one of the last sessions of Moose Camp, and end the day wandering the UBC campus with GPS in hand. Ideally, we'll have some photographers along to document the process, and we'll be able to combine GPS timelogs with photos and see it all on a map.

Do you know someone that knows all about geocaching? I'd like to talk to them...

Yes! We did it...or will do it. We're going to have another Northern Voice!

Update: did I mention it's going to be out at the UBC Forest Sciences Centre? Which is fantastic, according to these pictures from Cyprien.

Our "mandate" has always been to make a highly accessible event that would be of interest and educational for a wide range of people. For people who aren't necessarily techies and/or who haven't been exposed to some of the stuff we cover on personal blogging and other tech (who also tend to be local Vancouverites...can we get non-techies from other cities to come?), I like to think Northern Voice gives them a bit of a taste of what's new. Not necessarily new-bleeding-edge, but new-you-can-use-it-now.

Maybe techies are tired of Blogging 101, Wiki 101, and Photo Sharing 101. I know we can keep giving these sessions every single year. And you, the techie reading this post (hi, Mom!), should sit in and share your knowledge and perspective.

You know the phrase, "This isn't your mother's X?". Well, Northern Voice is your mother's conference. But the neat part, it's also for you techies. Cheap, fun, educational, mind-expanding.

Right now, the speaker submission page is open. One thing to note....write a good abstract, and take filling that speaker submission form out seriously. We got lots of entries from great folks who just didn't bother telling us what they would talk about, or make a case for why they should have a session (or un-session, as the case may be). Colin Brumelle (and yes, he works with me at Bryght), was the only abstract submission that was unanimously voted in on the first pass.

What kind of submissions do we want to see? Well, let me tell you what I would love to see... 

I sat down with Robert Scoble at Gnomedex, asking him what he would like to see at next year's Northern Voice (he mentioned it briefly talking about Kris' part in a MediaShift article). We talked about two things: Geolocation and virtual worlds.

Abstracting this a little, to me it means the intersection of the physical world with online. Blogging has always done this -- with people bring pieces of their offline lives online, or helping to make real life connections through communicating online.

I talked about our mandate -- appealing to a wide range of people. Geolocation and virtual worlds are still new. But, not too new that people can't start experimenting if someone gives them a few pointers. Flickr now has integrated geotagging, and Second Life continues to explode. Your barber is not unlikely to play World of Warcraft, and the Nokia N95 has GPS and photo sharing built in.

What are you waiting for? Go make a great speaker submission, and let everyone know to get their moose, like D'Arcy just did (first post -- nice work!).

P.S. What can we do as a fun live event? Scoble suggests a photowalk. I think we should do a photowalk plus geocaching plus geotagging plus constructing virtual worlds. Or something :P 

It's been a busy couple of weeks. My last post was from San Francisco, and I haven't even finished posting my notes from the Internet Identity Workshop that I was attending down there.

I'm sitting in the airport waiting to board a flight to Toronto. I'll be there until next Wednesday, attending not one, not two, but three separate conference/events.

They are, in order:

• Drupal Camp Toronto
• Bar Camp Toronto
• Mesh Conference

For some reason, I waited until the last minute to buy a ticket to Mesh. It turns out that Troy will be joining me there, I'll be hanging out in the unconference room (check the wiki for updates around that) and looking to connect with some eastern folks that left nice comments on my first post saying I was coming -- like John Philip Green. See you in a bit, I still need to update my 43 People list. 

And this will be a very Drupal-y time, I think. This post in IT Business.ca says "Everything's coming up Drupal". I probably need to debunk that in more detail -- the summary is that only low budget companies are choosing open source. 

Identity-related happenings are definitely chugging along. The next Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) is something I probably need to go to (upcoming.org).

IIW is being put together by Kaliya, Doc, and Phil. I'm looking forward to doing things the open space way with my pal Kaliya. I'll have to think about what I might present. I need to spend some more time with the Clipper Z guys...maybe I can represent some of the things we talked about (distributed reputation management) when I was in Bologna on their behalf (unless they're coming, of course...).

An aside: I saw the announcement via Doc, and realized that somewhere along the way Phil Windley's excellent blog had gotten lost from my aggregator. I'm all caught up now, and realize that he's done a couple of posts that I've had rolling around in my head for a while: Google authentication (especially in regards to Joga) and the simple explanation of MicroID. It's great when you can just point to things like that and say "yes, that's pretty much what I was thinking, only written down in a clear and elegant way". Suffice it to say, Phil's back in the aggregator, and I'm looking forward to spending some time around him and other smart folks at IIW.

Somehow when I wasn't looking, the OSCMS Summit that I talked about a while back came together really nicely. It takes place February 7 - 9 here in Vancouver, right before Moose Camp and Northern Voice. If you're an open source developer or are interested in CMS applications, come by and check it out. We've been lucky enough to get reduced rates at the same UBC Robson Square venue as Northern Voice.

Who's coming? Well, I admit that things will be a little Drupal-centric (we've got about 90 people coming from around the world). Maybe I can prod Scott Laird one more time to talk to us about Typo and Ruby on Rails, or maybe tell us about his new boss and teach us some search or mapping APIs or something.