Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

I still don't know what to make of technology conferences. I don't think I get a lot out of them, since either I know the subject matter (Northern Voice 2005, Gnomedex) or don't care (most of the sessions at OSCON, but the ones I did attend were fairly interesting and new to me). I'm excited about Moose Camp, which theoretically will be self-organizing along the lines of Barcamp, and like last year's conference there will no doubt be interesting people that I know online but haven't met—Julie Leung and Suw Charman are but two examples—and cool people I heard about. The reason conferences don't really do much for me is because I already spent 6 years being lectured at in university and haven't been able to rise above my shyness around large groups of people speaking loudly to get the most out of the time in between sessions (working on that one), which is where a most of the conversations between attendees happen. Again, Moose Camp should change this, as it seems like it's going to be the most "unconference"-like part of the two-day event.

Darren Barefoot, Boris Mann, Brian Lamb, Patrick Dinnen, Kris Krug and Derek K. Miller have written about it. Despite the fact that there is one woman on the organizing committee and a woman has yet to publicly notice that the conference has been announced (at least according to my scans, and hey, I'm a blogger, I demand immediate results!), I'd be very surprised if the percentage of women dropped below that of last year's, which I hear was around 40%.

(As a disclosure I work with some of the conference organizers and did some work to redirect links existing links to 2005's site and redirect www.northernvoice.ca to 2006.northernvoice.ca. That said I paid full price for admission, which at $50, is really cheap.)