xml-dev - Re: ANN: XTech 2000 in San Jose

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

<Advertisement>I'm pumped about the program.  We got this massive number
of submissions - over three times the number we had space for - and we had
to turn some down that were just great.  The thing that's interesting and
new is that we couldn't shake out a sane division of things into tracks that
didn't end up with lots of obviously red-hot papers positioned against 
each other.  So we're doing a single tech track, which means the
speakers are going to have to compress their presentations, but the audience
for each will be big.  I really didn't want to co-chair another one of
these but I'm glad I got talked into it.  You wanna be there. 
</Advertisement>

At 01:29 PM 1/31/00 -0600, Steven R. Newcomb wrote:
>> We're also trying out a new evening event, called "Town Hall
>> Meetings": on the Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, after dinner, we're
>> going to hold open-mike town-hall meetings on key W3C standards.
>
>Why limit the topics of discussion to "key W3C standards"?  This
>doesn't sound like a Town Hall Meeting to me.  It sounds much more
>like a meeting of a particular political party.  

The co-chairs of the conference (Jon and David and I) picked the subjects
solely on the basis of what we thought would generate the most interest
and lead to discussions that would have value to those who participated
and listened.  Some other topics that might have been good candidates
included SML, Programming Languages, and server-side software.  Based 
on what we see around the industry, we get the feeling that schemas and 
query are both Hot Stuff, and we were able to get some key people from 
those committees to come and pitch in.  All points of view are welcome.  
We haven't tried this before so let's see how it works out.

>Perhaps more to the point, who is paying for the meeting space and the
>open mike?  If it's the participants in XTech 2000, by means of their
>conference registration fees, then why aren't *they* in control of the
>agenda?

They are, really.  The GCA, who is running the conference, really only cares
about one thing: how many people come.  They will do what they can to
select an agenda that attracts the maximal number of people.  Not exactly
the elegance of parliamentary procedure, but it should tend to the
same end.  -T.


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