April 2008

Did you know that Innotech is this week? This is a great local conference that draws people from the whole region with some fantastic world-class speakers. Sean Lowery has done another amazing job lining up speakers and building out several new tracks. Highlights include:

• eMarketing Summit: Two full days of Online Marketing presentations focused on “How To” & real-world business to business scenarios.
• NW CIO Summit: An exclusive Special Event @ InnoTech, the NW CIO Summit is open only to executive level IT professionals.
• Open Source Summit: A full day of dedicated Open Source presentations - Open to All Attendees
• Clean Technology Track: A full day of Clean Tech presentations, on Wednesday, 4/16, presented by SAO’s Clean Tech Forum
• Non Profit Technology Summit: The Non Profit Technology Summit features seminars specifically focused on technology issues of nonprofits.

I hope to see you there. I’ll be presenting at the Open Source Summit for the ‘Open in Oregon Lightning Talks’ and the CIO Beta Summit Demo. Amazingly these are at the exact same time so that should be interesting; you’ll get to see me in a dead sprint between session rooms. :-)

You should really make time to attend this event; its a fantastic place to network and catch up with all of the latest things happening in Portland and the Northwest. If you’re around make sure to Twitter about it and let’s connect!

When we look back at 2008 it will be the year that we saw as the start of something great with freeing users’ data and putting it in their control. We’ve already seen some great momentum around the Data Portability project and seen some great events (such as SG FooCamp ‘08). Several more events are just on the horizon and you should make sure you attend.

The first event is the Data Sharing Workshop happening April 18th and 19th in downtown San Francisco. This is happening on a Friday and Saturday so as to best accommodate the needs of attendees and with it right in the city we should see a larger audience for something further down the peninsula.

Directly following IIW 2008a we’ll be having the Data Sharing Summit. This will be a chance for stakeholders across the entire data portability eco-system to come together and talk brass tacks about what we’re trying to accomplish and how to make it a reality. We’ll be focusing on specific technical details and how we’re going to get from point A (today) to point B (tomorrow).

Why two events so close together? Well, we’ve got a lot of work to do and we’re already a quarter of the way through 2008. If you’re at all interested in participating in the data sharing/portability conversation these are the two events to attend without question.

I hope to see you there!