layout: post title: "Get your Moose on: This IS your mother's conference" created: 1161359601 categories:

• Social Media
• Vancouver
• virtual worlds
• Robert Scoble
• Northern Voice 2007
• northern voice
• geolocation
• conference

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