It's already been over two months since the last Oxford Geek Night. Because everyone was away for holidays and then for the conference season, and if you also add a dash of minor illness into the mixture, we've been holding off organising the next OGN until we were ready to get back into the swing of it.
Now, the wait is over. Oxford Geek Nights #19 will be on Wednesday, 1 December 2010. Put it in your diaries now! (We're also planning OGN20 for some time in late January or early February 2011: exact date to be confirmed soon.)
Because we've had chance to catch our breath, two major things have happened. The first is that we've already got two brilliant keynote talks confirmed for OGN19. Leila Johnston, self-styled punk broadcaster, co-presenter of the Shift Run Stop podcast and published author, will be talking about Making things fast. We also have David Caruana and Florian Müller from Alfresco to talk about the OASIS standard on making content management systems interoperable. That means an international standard on how CMS-authored sites can talk to each other.
The second major change to Oxford Geek Nights is that Wes West and Jonny Grum are joining me as co-planners and helping to share the burden. That should mean that OGN tech will be more reliable and OGN planning more robust, and each night itself should hang together that little bit more, because we can all pitch in where necessary. Thanks to Wes and Jonny for joining the existing team of Nick Burch (wifi), Neal Todd (video) and me.
Incidentally, as always: we need microslot volunteers! Do you think you could speak to a roomful of geeks for five minutes on some topic close to your heart? If so, submit your microslot proposal at http://bit.ly/ogn-microslot . See? We've even got a new dedicated microslot URL. We're so technically advanced these days that we're practically robots from the future.
Incidentally, we'd like to thank everyone who submitted feedback recently: we got an unprecedented response, with dozens and dozens of intelligent responses. Just what you'd expect from Oxford's smart, engaged geek crowd. But because of time pressures we've not yet been able to plough through all of that data; so we've decided to prioritize planning OGN19, but hope to incorporate some of your thoughts into the OGNs soon.
OGN19, then. December 1. Leave your chocolate advent calendars at home and come along to the Jericho Tavern.
