Ladies and Gentlemen, the Call for Participation for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2006 has been posted, and I recommend you all go and read it, come up with good ideas and then submit them. I’ve been to the last three years of the conference, and presented at ETech 2003 and (twice) at ETech2005 and I can say without reservation that it’s a fascinating and inspiring conference, well worth attending, and even better to present at. If you have insight to share about future technologies or if you have projects that you’ve built that you think might be part of a foundation for the world to come, then you should be trying to talk at ETech. It’s by far the best way to expose yourselve to a community of creative peers and business people, to find new people to collaborate with and maybe even find some money or backing for your enterprise. It’s also bloody good fun.
This year, I’m delighted to report that I’m on the progamme committee for the event as well as attending. This means that I have a new responsibility and desire – to try and uncover new people and new work going on in the world and to try and persuade them to submit a proposal. So even if you’re not yourself thinking about submitting something, if you know someone who you think would be particularly good – either a famous technologist or a sole researcher working in their backroom on a fascinating problem, then point them in the direction of the Call for Participation and/or send me as much information as you can about them – including any URLs you think might be relevant or interesting. My e-mail address remains tom {at} the name of this website – or post your thoughts below in the comments.
You only have around three weeks to get your submissions in – the final date is September 19, 2005 – so get thinking. This year’s call is full of interesting starting places to do with handling and navigating vast amounts of information and media, exploiting or dealing with the unexpected affordances of new technologies, drawing data and systems together across the internet to generate a service-to-service network effect and the increasing ubiquity of what was previously hardcore and specialist technology. There’s an enormous amount to think about and react to in the Call for Participation alone, but feel free to go beyond it and find the stuff that we’re missing.