For the majority of the last ten years, I've been living in Europe with Croatia occupying the last seven as a stay at home father. It was there, in 2002, that I started doing web stuff for money and like many, I taught myself via great internet resources. There are too many influences to list, yet coincidentally a few of them happen to come from the UK.

The first one to come to mind was Patrick Griffiths with all kinds of elastic goodness. At some point he created Vivabit which did @media, a conference for web designers and developers. So for learning, the internet resources were not going to be enough. I needed to get out of the house and go to one of these web conferences that everyone keeps talking about that are so worth the trip. So, last year I arranged to be in the neighbourhood for @media 2006 and it was great-worth the trip. But I needed more.

This is when I heard about d.Construct, another Web Design Conference brought to the world by the folks at Clearleft. This is where the other great influences from the UK enter the story.

I discovered Richard Rutter in late 2002, via I can't remember, because his web log was a gold mine of sweet links. One of those links led me to Jeremy Keith. Later on, I remember finding Andy Budd because he wrote something about how to avoid some Box Model Hack. Amongst others, these were the best inspirations and resources for doing the right thing. Little did I know that they would get together and do great things.

So, we were leaving Croatia, and I got my ducks in a row to make it to d.Construct on my way back to the USA. The whole diversion was great in many ways, including the many people I got to meet. But more specifically, was that for having travelled the farthest to attend the awarded me with a SXSW2007 registration. This is an event I've wanted to attend since I started learning this web stuff.

Now I have no more excuses. I'm in the neighbourhood and SXSW is approaching. I'm thankful to many, but very so to Clearleft. Thank you.

• d.Construct 2007
  Holding page for September event
  (tags: brighton design web conference)
• The Potential Use of MMORPGs by Terrorists
  (tags: terrorism MMORPG online)
• Benedetto Vigna
  The Man Behind the Chip Behind the Wii
  (tags: hardware wii nintendo)

• d.Construct 2007: User Experience Design Conference
  The 2007 version of the wonderful d.construct conference
• BuzzMachine :: USA Tomorrow
  The USA Today is heading toward the social web with its new redesign. They are using automated keywording (or they say tagging to bring related articles closer).
• Hawk Wings :: A faster way to speed up Mail.app
• Thingology (LibraryThing ideas blog): Percent who tag
  Really good look at triggers in tagging one's own collection of things

Starting with SXSW in just over a weeks time, I've got a pretty hectic conference schedule planned for the next couple of months. I'm going to be speaking at Web Design World in San Francisco on the 26th March, so rather than come back in between, I've decided to stay over in the states. I'm going to try and get to the IA Summit while I'm there as it looks like a fantastic line-up of speakers, and I'm a big fan of Vegas. The only sad thing is that I'l have to miss the last day, but all the best stuff seems to be at the start anyway.

Between these events I'm planing to hang out in San Fran for a while and get some writing done. I'm not a big fan of sitting in hotel rooms, so I'll probably check out the whole Coworking thing. If you have any other suggestions for cool places to work, like a nice wifi cafe or something, please let me know. On a similar note, I don't know San Francisco that well, so any recommendations on places to stay would be most welcome.

I've got a few friends and contacts in SF, so I'm looking forward to meeting up with them and getting an insiders tour of the city. I'm also hoping I can blag a visit to the Apple, Google and Yahoo! campuses while I'm there, so if you have any connections, please let me know. Hopefully I won't be working the whole time, so it would be great to hire a car for a couple of days and get out of the city. Where would you recommend going for a couple of days break?

When I get back to the UK I'll be heading up to Edinburgh for the Highland Fling conference. I really like Edinburgh so that should be a lot of fun. Thankfully the rest of April is looking pretty open, so I should have a couple of weeks where I can get some proper work done. MIX 07 is at the end of the month, and while I don't have tickets yet, I'm hoping I can sort something out.

Next up is @media Asia which I'm really excited about. I love Hong Kong so really hope the event is a success. After that is @media Europe which I'll be attending but won't be speaking at this year.

A couple of weeks ago Jeffrey asked if I wanted to speak at An Event Apart Seattle on the 21st-22nd June and I literally jumped at the chance. I really love what Jeffrey and Eric are doing with these events, and have been trying to get them to come over to the UK for some time. In the meantime, I'm really looking forward to the event, and speaking with the likes of Jeff Veen, Khoi Vinh, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson and Jason Santa Maria, not to mention Jeffrey and Eric.

The following week I'll be speaking at a new event in Spain which has yet to be announced, after which I think I'll need a good long rest before d.Construct 2007 at the beginning of September.

• SXSW - Speaking
• IA Summit - Attending
• Web Design World - Speaking
• Highland Fling - Speaking
• Future of Web Design - Attending
• MIX 07 - Attending (hopefully)
• XTech - Attending (hopefully)
• Reboot 9.0 - Attending (hopefully)
• @media Asia - Speaking
• @media Europe - Attending
• An Event Apart Seattle - Speaking
• Serestandar - Speaking
• d.Construct 2007 - Organising

After the Future of Web Apps 2006 conference in San Francisco, a post by Chris Messina lamenting the lack of women in the line-up prompted heated debate and high emotions.

The Future of Web Apps 2007 conference just wrapped up in London and Jason Kottke has reignited the debate. What's changed since the last time? Not much.

Tempers are still getting frayed and the discourse is generally pretty unhelpful.

Let me say from the start that I do think there is a problem with having so many conferences with such unbalanced line-ups and I firmly believe that a lot of the responsibility lies with the organisers to change things. That said, I also understand just how hard it is to put on any kind of conference at all.

To the people accusing conference organisers of being some kind of cabalistic old boy's network: you're really not helping. You'll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

To the people organising conferences who throw up their hands and say "it's not our job, we're just reflecting the sad reality": you're being equally unhelpful.

So, all of you: try walking a mile in the other person's shoes. That way, if you still don't agree, you'll be a mile away from the other person and you've made off with their shoes.

Eric came out with a provacative post that's just aching to be quoted out of context:

So, here it is: as a conference organizer, I don't care about diversity.

I admire and respect Eric but I think in this instance that he is wrong. We'll just have to agree to disagree.

Eric makes the very persuasive argument that to put on a successful conference, the line-up needs to be filled with well-known, established speakers. (This prompted the obvious question from a few people in the comments; just how does one become well-known or established? As Jen says, Eric, it is becoming a circle jerk.)

Success doesn't just mean financial success, though I readily admit that the economics of organising a conference are fiendish. A successful conference is about more than just getting bums on seats.

Yes, if you fill a line-up with "A-listers" then you'll sell all your tickets and the attendees will learn from the best and everyone will be happy. in the short term. In the long term, it's unsustainable. It leads to a closed loop, a neverending cycle of the same names talking about the same subjects. Diversity isn't just a means to an end (that end being a better conference), it is in and of itself, A Good Thing.

Conferences, especially well-established conferences (and I would put An Event Apart into that category) can and should take some chances. Yes, it's risky. No, you can't guarantee ticket sales. But it will be a better conference if the line-up has some wild cards.

I firmly believe that conferences shouldn't simply be mirrors for the Web business, reflecting whatever is current and accepted. A good conference can act as a force on the industry. Conference organisers have a great opportunity here and I think it's a shame to see it wasted.

Alright. enough talking about conference organisers as if they were some kind of separate caste of people. It's time to point the finger at myself.

My company, Clearleft, organises the dConstruct conference in Brighton every year. It's really Andy's baby but he very kindly asks for my opinions in putting the conference together. I personally feel very strongly that this year's dConstruct needs to change from last year's homogenous line-up (I'm pretty sure Andy agrees).

Even if we sell every ticket, even if everybody blogs about having a great time, if the line-up consists of a bunch of white male speakers ("A-list" or otherwise), I will consider the conference a failure.

But what to do? The perceived wisdom is that there are simply far more kick-ass men speakers than women. I don't believe that's true. I think there are far more visible men in our industry, but with just a bit effort it's entirely possible to find a wealth of women speakers who can truthfully be described as well and truly kick-ass.

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to blog about this, but for months now, we at Clearleft have had a BaseCamp project set up with the specific intention of finding new blood for dConstruct. We've invited people from outside our circle of expertise and interests and asked them to suggest speakers. The idea is to deliberately introduce diversity, to stir things up a bit and ultimately, to put together the most kick-ass line-up of speakers we can.

Is this tokenism? Absolutely not. I fully concur with Eric when he says:

What's important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability.

But I don't believe that this attitude conflicts in any way with the desire to increase diversity. It's entirely possible to put together a superb line-up of diverse speakers.

Don't believe me? Take a look at Web Directions North (or South for that matter), one of the best, most stimulating conferences I've ever attended. They didn't make a big deal about the mixture of topics and presenters, they just put together the best line-up they could.

I'm not saying it's easy. I know for a fact that it's a lot of hard work. But it's achievable; Web Directions is a testament to that.

I'm also going to have to agree to disagree with Tantek, another person I admire and respect greatly. He is of the opinion the kind of thing I'm suggesting would indeed fall under the category of tokenism:

Why is it that gender (and less often race, nay, skin-color, see below) are the only physical characteristics that lots of otherwise smart people appear to chime in support for diversity of?

Where are all the green-eyed folks? Where are all the folks with facial tattoos? Where are all the redheads? Where are the speakers with non-ear facial piercings?

Actually, I would agree with Tantek if I were talking about diversity of sexes, but I'm not. I'm talking about diversity of gender. There's a difference. Sex means male or female. Gender means masculine or feminine.

I fully agree that a speaker's sex makes about as much difference as their eye-colour or hairstyle but a speaker's gender can and does affect their outlook and experience. As someone who has a (primarily) masculine gender, I know that I can learn a lot more from being in a mixed masculine/feminine environment. That's one of the reasons why I'm glad my band isn't an all-male affair.

I'm not just arguing semantics here. I'm trying to point out why I think Tantek's argument is reducto ad absurdum. Gender isn't like eye-colour. Introducing more gender diversity into a conference is productive in the same way as introducing someone with a background in product design or some other non-Web field that can offer a new perspective on our industry (this isn't just an off-hand comparison).

I hope I've made my point clear. Let me reiterate that I can see both sides of this debate but I do come down firmly on the side of increasing diversity. I just hope that I can work towards this goal in a constructive way.

Frankly, I find Jason Kottke's reductionist statistical approach to be counter-productive. It's not just about numbers, Jason. I'm also not so sure that Anil's abrasive style is particularly constructive but his clever riposte to the Future of Web Apps line-up is illuminating.

I do feel bad for Ryan. He always seems to bear the brunt of the blame even though plenty of other conferences are equally lacking in diversity.

However. I do take issue with Ryan's attempt to wash his hands by pointing out just how many of the speaker slots were bought by sponsors. I'm sorry, but selling time slots to the highest bidder is no way to put a conference together. I'm well aware of the economic realities of putting on a conference and I know that selling slots to sponsors is established practice in certain circles but it won't cut it with the geek crowd.

Again, Web Directions North managed to get this just right by allowing companies to sponsor speakers. So the speakers were all chosen for their expertise, knowledge and perhaps even diversity, and then Adobe or Microsoft were given the opportunity to introduce the speakers. It sure beats product pitches.

I want to finish with an observation on this whole issue of gender diversity at Web conferences.

This debate isn't going to go away. It looks like it's going to flare up every few months. Clearly, plenty of bloggers-who are also probably the target audience for a lot of these conferences-really care about this issue and want to see some changes. Yet every time the issue is raised, conference organisers fall back on the argument that they need to fill the auditorium and that the best way of doing that is to give people the same "A-list" speakers that have always worked in the past. In other words, give the people what they want.

Well, we want diversity.

It's kind of like the whole brouhaha with Adobe and their crappy new icons. The majority of Adobe's potential customers disliked the icons and wrote good, well-reasoned blog posts explaining why. As Aral so excellently noted, Adobe deliberately chose to ignore this wealth of valuable feedback. I see conferences falling into the same trap. The very fact that this debate is taking place (and continues to take place ever more frequently) should be sending a message that this is an important issue that needs to be addressed.

It reminds me of the old joke. A guy walks into a shop and asks for some product or other. The shopkeeper says, "We don't stock that. There's no demand for it." The shopkeeper then adds, "It's funny: you're the tenth person to ask for that today."

Tagged with diversity gender equality wdn07 fowa07 dconstruct06 aea

I'm slowly winding my way back north after Future of Web Apps with a big-ass bag of schwag and business cards. The year the overall messages seemed to be:

• Keep it simple.
• Cater for individuals first and the community second.
• We've yet to see the really killer webapps.

First up, the hot...

It was one of the most social conferences I've been too. The cards and stickers were a fantastic idea and made it very easy to approach people. I'd love to see the idea expanded upon in future to maybe include more 'types' - perhaps "I'm looking to collaborate with...", "I've got something cool to show you...", "Let me convince you why XXX rocks.." , anything that gets people speaking to each other is worthwhile.

There were some great speakers. Simon WIllison talked a mile a minute about OpenID; Mike Arrington explained why it's not a Bubble; Tara Hunt used phrases like "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" to discuss community building and Last.fm gave an overview of their dealings with downtime, not censoring their users and ikea furniture*. The best presentation of the two days came from an unlikely source: Ben Holmes gave us a peek into the brain of a VC and some hints about when, and when not, to take VC cash. It wasn't something that's directly relevant to me today, but a boy can dream.

..and the not so hot

Lack of wifi was a bit of a bummer - apparently it was in place but BT cocked up. I know some people, Ryan included, have mixed feelings about people tapping away on laptops during the talks. However, lack of connectivity caused problems for a couple of the speakers and I think it would have been useful for the people trying to make impromptu pitches in the breaks.

"Fully Catered Lunch" != "Sandwiches"

I know that the sponsor spots are a necessary evil at these things and there were some pretty entertaining ones (Simon Wardley, in particular) but there did seem to be an awful lot of ad breaks. Even two of the non-sponsored spots (Amazon and Adobe) seem to be pitches for their own products.

I think the worst move was making the final presentation a sponsor spot: it really made the conference end on a "meh, time to go home" note. In contrast, d.construct had Jeffery Veen telling us that we're trailblazers and the future of the internet is in our hands. Who would you rather closed a concert: Jimmy Hendrix playing Voodoo Chile or Peter Andre reminding you to buy some Diet Coke?

Overall, I'm glad I attended but I don't think I'll be coming down for it next year: maybe Future of Web Design will get my money instead.

*To the guy sitting behind me during Anil's talk who decided that a conference hall was the ideal place to take a ten minute phonecall - you're an asshole. Please die. That is all.

Where did the last six months go?

It doesn't seem like it was that long ago that I was [getting excited][Camp] in the build-up to [Reading][], [BarCampLondon][], and [d.Construct '06][] (all three of which were incredibly fun).

Since then, I've managed to get a job at [Yahoo! Europe][] as a web developer, ...

It's wet and I'm late. Registration started at an unfeasibly early 8am but I arrive just in time to get a seat at the back of the conference hall and see the lampost-like compere Ryan Carson take the stage and introduce Mike Arrington, journo-in-chief at TechCrunch.

Mike gives us the lowdown on the huge amount of VC money funding "Web 2.0? projects ($600m in 2006), how to run a good start-up (have a good idea, business plan, revenue model), why the USA is better for tech entrepreneurs (Brit families tend to view start-ups with caution - you know, "When are you going to get a proper job?") and how technologies like Apollo will be revolutionary in allowing a single applications to run both on the web and on the desktop. I remain unconvinced.

Edwin Aoki, architect at AOL, has the honour of giving the first of many 'advertalks' which are liberally sprinkled throughout the schedule. FOWA07 has seven hierarchically arranged sponsors. AOL are a Gold sponsor but even this shiny label leaves them in a lowly joint third place. Edwin talks about web apps becoming syndicated, mash-ups, embedded content and. well, nothing hugely thrilling really.

The fourth speaker, and fourth North American, is Tara Hunt who talks about online communities and tells us all to throw away the business plan, no doubt to Mike Arrington's dismay. Tara is a really good presenter, passionate about the web and she enthuses about all things social using quite remarkable terms such as "fulfillment of needs", "self-actualisation" and "karma points". Compelling stuff.

The first Brit to take the stage is Simon Wardley of Fotango who's a natural presenter. It's another advertalk, this time for Zimki, but at least it's a funny one.

After an excellent in-depth look at the funding of web apps from the mighty VC firm Index Ventures (to get your hands on their cash all you need is "an excellent product, an excellent development team and a large potential market opportunity") we get the best presentation of the day from Last.fm's Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa Cavia.

Last.fm is one of Britain's most celebrated web start-ups and rightly so. Their recent figures are staggering: 15 million tracks scrobbled a day (or 175 a second), 6 billion scrobbled since 2003, 10 million unique artists scrobbled in total along with 70 million unique tracks and 145,000 artist wikis created. We get the full story from Matthew, from the founders living in tents on a Whitechapel roof terrace through to the company doubling in size to 40 employees in the last six months. Anil gives a technical overview and goes into some detail about "attention data" (buzzword alert: "MyWare") and how to monetize it. I'm hugely impressed.

A tough act to follow and poor (well, loaded probably) old TJ Kang, ThinkFree CEO, didn't fare particularly well. Neither did Amazon's Werner Vogels who talked at great length about the wonders of S3 and and other Amazon services but I'd heard all this before at dConstruct. It hasn't got any more compelling for me since then. The Soocial plug-a-thon was really good fun and, to end the day, eagerly awaited hacker hero Kevin Rose gave a great talk about Digg, it's data and where they go from here.

And that was that. It was a good day but what would Day Two bring.

Technorati tags: fowa, fowalondon07, futureofwebapps

[Read in the voice of a movie trailer narrator]

On the 23rd May 2007 in the sleepy Village of Reading, England (For our overseas readers that's in Europeland), there will be an event unlike any event you've ever attended before.

Developers from around the world are in termoil, their tools and languages give them unlimited choice leaving them bewildered and lost. Only two men have the answer to this technological dilemma, and that answer is NxtGGenUK Fest07.

Yes folks, the chuckle brothers are about to embark on their most extravegant outing yet - they're running a conference in Reading this coming May!

The day has a theme: "Into the future .". We start the day looking at current technologies such as Vista, then we move into the 'Orcas' timeframe, then to 12 months hence or so, probably taking a look at dynamic languages and then really moving out into 'who knows' with a session from Microsoft Research. There will be a keynote, with an appearance from UK DPE manager Kevin McDaniel and words from the NxtGenUG crew and finally the day will finish with a new 'Game Show' style session courtesy of NxtGenUG featuring a lot of 'swag'!

We're absolutely chuffed to bits to announce that the 'headline' speaker is top TechEd speaker Rafal Lukawiecki and we will also be joined by Daniel Moth and Mike Taulty (perhaps) of the UK DPE and also by Lorna Brown from Microsoft Research. We have one more speaker to announce too, which we hope to do next week.

At lunchtime there will be 'Grok' talks presented by NxtGenUG members, on a variety of subjects to be announced.

This event is FREE to all NxtGenUG members and a mere £54.99 for non-members until 1 March 2007, check out the URL for more details. Numbers are strictly limited ( I know everybody says that . but we really mean it this time - 230 tops!) so register early is our advice!

Sounds like it will be a good day out - nice and entertaining :-)

It had to happen, we finally got it done! :-)

Dave has been working on the site and has put together the agenda page for WebDD.

Cheers,

Phil.