B. Mann Consulting

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I'm heading over to the Northern Voice 2008 organizer's debrief.

My take on our current attendee split: edu-bloggers, industry veterans coming to connect with their members and/or promote a new social media service, and a large contingent of personal bloggers, as was our original mission. Does this seem accurate to you?

I mention Dave Olson's F*** Stats, Make Art presentation.

Next year is going to be tough (well, it feels that way for *me* who has been overly busy and didn't contribute as much to the pre-organization), but we're now a registered society in BC. What will this let us accomplish? Not sure, but certainly could be interesting. I have some ideas for the 2010 "Olympics" edition of Northern Voice....

Northern Voice 2008 is wrapped. Exhilarating. Fun. New faces. Old faces. Good discussions. Sore throat. Vitamin C. A bit too much beer. People. Talking. PEOPLE.

Been a long couple of days starting way back on Wednesday night with the launch of Music Direction supported by Invoke Media and then CaseCampVancouver3.

The pic is Megan Cole as captured by Chris Heuer, leading a social media mecca. Inspiring.

aka the "I am so far behind that I even had to steal the title of this post from Megan"

I was joking with Meg that I was just going to cut and paste her entire blog post. It's not that far off :P We're heading into Christmas break time, but still lots and lots of stuff on the go, and good things right in the New Year.

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.

So, we were lucky enough to get a killer deal on our space at the UBC campus for Northern Voice 2007. This meant that we had some money available to do other things with.

We decided one of the things we wanted to do was to increase the reach of the conference. We're lucky enough to have a lot of friends travel great distances already to come to the conference, but maybe there's a really passionate blogger somewhere far away that just doesn't have the money to be able to travel.

Today Darren posted the details on the Northern Voice Travel Bursaries -- six travel bursaries of $500CDN each. We'll award these based on a blog/video/photo/podcast post that the applicant makes, and then fill out the bursary submission form.

It's the middle of January, and I can't wait for the end of February to roll around. 

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 

No, really, we want people talking. Northern Voice 2006 is pretty much right around the corner. The official deadline is tomorrow* next week, Wednesday, Nov. 16th. So apply as a speaker. Remember, this is a very "open tent", not necessarily über techie conference. Come and share stories with us in Vancouver. It's going to be the same shareable size -- about 250 people give or take, except that day 1 is Moose Camp -- an open day for special interest groups or just old friends to take over the space. This is not a complete unconference -- maybe you want to organize a mini conference of 10 or 20 people that are all interested in the same subject. Head over to the wiki and self organize (and let us know, and we'll help make sure the word gets out).

I may actually extend this conference and try and gather people together for the week preceding Moose Camp/Northern Voice -- a gathering of open source CMS/Blogging tools to talk about cross platform issues and working more closely together on standards and interoperability. Watch this space for more info (think Vancouver/Whistler in February: how could you NOT want to come?). At the very least, there will likely be a DrupalCon Vancouver 2006. Moose Camp will be the culmination of this event, hopefully as fun as the BarCamp Amsterdam event I attended at Mediamatic. What can I say, I might just be addicted to these things...

This year we did Northern Voice in Vancouver. We had a fantastic time and met a ton of interesting people.

The moose is loose again, as Darren says, as we start planning for the February 2006 edition of of Northern Voice...now with bonus Moose Camp the day before.

Wander over to the site and glory in the all the techie tweaks the other organizers let me roll in this year. I've been so busy that I've managed to only contribute a little to the process so far. But...potluck! I will get this off the ground this time.

What are you waiting for? Clicky-clicky!