BIL filling fast
BIL is over half-full (or less than half-empty, if you swing that way). Register now to reserve your space !
There is more room available in the facility, but we need sponsors to get it. Would you like to bring these great ideas to more people? Be a BIL Sponsor, and we’ll get more space!
More details about the budget are on the wiki, feel free to post questions and ideas. To recap — we’re going to fill up, and if you Sponsor BIL we’ll get more room.
Revision3 Filming BIL
Photo by Scott Beale
When we asked BIL’ders how best to improve BIL, the #1 response was “record the talks and put them online.”
Last year we did have Robert Scoble livestreaming the event through his cell phone and Qik, and Adrian Cockcroft posted the audio from some of the talks.
This year we wanted to provide high quality video, and luckily the great guys at Revision3 agreed to help out. They will be filming the talks in the main room and posting them online afterwards. This means the community’s favorite talks will be shared in high quality on our website, Revision3’s site, iTunes, and a few other locations.
BUT, we still need people to bring cameras to film the talks in the smaller rooms. If this is something you might be interested in doing, sign up at the wiki. You can do as little or as much filming as you want. For example, if you’re in a talk and you see no one filming it, pull out your camera and film it.
You're invited to BIL2009
(We just sent this out as an email to those who signed up for our mailing list. I’m posting it here as well for those who didn’t receive it.)
Hello!
You’re receiving this email because you signed up at http://bilconference.com
BIL is an ad-hoc conference for people changing the world in big ways. It’s a place for passionate people to come together to energize, brainstorm, and take action.
The next BIL will be February 7-8, ‘09 at California State University in Long Beach!
There are a bunch of things you can do to get ready…
- Check out the website and report typos… www.BILconference.com
- Check out the talks we’ve already got up… http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talks
- Register… http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/user/signup
- Donate (tax-deductable)… http://bilconference.com/sponsors/
Sign up early; last year we filled up. This is free, but we can’t be a fire hazard.
We’ve got some great speakers already, below are a few which caught my eye. Remember — you too can speak — sign up!
http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talks
- Eric Rasmussen, CEO of InSTEDD (www.instedd.org), which received TED Prize support in 2006, will show the complex relationship between global climate and disease in Climate Change, Disaster Response, and the Spread of Infectious Diseases
http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talk/details/5 - Silona Bonewald, founder of the League of Technical Voters (http://leagueoftechnicalvoters.org), will outline her plan for a transparent US Federal Budget (and then the world!) in Transparent Government Starting With the Federal Budget
http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talk/details/4 - Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture For Humanity (www.architectureforhumanity.org) and recipient of the TED Prize, will examine the success of Open Architecture Network and explain the new Architecture Challenge: Classroom in Open Source Architecture : FromTED Prize to Reality
http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talk/details/5 - Whurley (http://whurley.com), Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy at BMC Software, will expound on the process of open source / open innovation in 15 Minutes With an Evil Genius
http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talk/details/11 - Ben Huh (http://benhuh.com), founder of I Can Has Cheezburger (http://icanhascheezburger.com) will tell us What’s Funny About The Interwebs
http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talk/details/12 - Chris Axton will give instructions on how to crash TED in The Art of Conference Crashing
http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talk/details/10
See you in Long Beach!
The BIL Crew
www.BILconference.com
BIL-ding the BIL Community
The good folks behind BIL 2009 asked me, Chris Bucchere, to guest post here with some remarks on BIL-ding their community site. (Sorry, I just can’t resist throwing in yet another BIL pun.)
First, some background: After leaving my position as Lead Engineer at Plumtree Software, I started my company — bdg — almost six years ago to help people figure out how to use some pretty complex software that, via two major acquisitions, now has the unfortunate moniker “Oracle Web Center Interaction.” As I and my fellow bdg-ers helped more and more customers over the years build out web applications on this infrastructure, we found that people’s needs have slowly been changing from less managed content to more of a user generated, participatory process. Companies started seeing value not only in controlled content aggregation through gadgets/portlets/widgets, but in blogs, podcasting, wikis, (increasingly micro) forums and social networking. In the fall of 2007, the divergent paths of UGC and portals collided when BEA Systems asked us to build a social network — on the Plumtree portal infrastructure — to power their “BEA Participate” user conference in May of 2008. From there, The Social Collective was born.
Now that a number of conferences, big and small, have used The Social Collective to encourage their attendees to network with one another before, during and after their events, we’re beginning to get the lay of the land. And that’s a good thing, because we’re currently working with a great team of developers at SXSW to build the new registrant directory for their legendary music, film and interactive (read: geek) festival, which will be taking Austin by storm for the 23rd time this coming March.
SXSW’s needs included a sizable information architecture effort to organize and present their calendar of events featuring over 1,800 bands, 80 of which might be playing at any given moment, not to mention hundreds of film screenings and interactive panels. Like SXSW, creating the social network for BIL presented its own set of challenges — the biggest one being that there is no schedule and that anyone can sign up to give a talk (about anything) at virtually any time.
For BIL, we started with run-of-the-mill social network features: friending, messaging, groups and some basic content aggregation from Twitter and from RSS feeds and other external links. We removed all of the track and breakout session management (which we are retooling anyway for SXSW), replaced the nod-to-corporate-America “products” section with the more friendly “ideas” feature and added a user interface for submitting and promoting your own talks. This “talks” section of the site also allows people to “fav” (pronounced like “gave” with an “f”) and comment on talks. (This part of the site is open to the public, but in order to add a talk or fav a talk, you need to register for an account.)
Throughout the site, there’s a general theme of social transparency. Nearly everything you do (absent of private messaging) is published on the site so that others can see what you’re up to via a Facebook-like news feed. This leads to all sorts of fun and interesting serendipitous social interactions. I could explain, but it’s much more fun to experience these things for yourself.
So, in closing, there are some things we do really well (like our two-way Twitter integration), some things we don’t do at all (yet), like OpenID integration, and some things that are still in-process, like our Facebook Connect-powered features. We’re learning a lot as we go (read: flying by the seat of our pants) and finding out that every conference we support has its own unique set of needs that vary wildly from one conference to another. That’s even more true when one conference is highly structured and planned months in advance and another is a willy-nilly “unconference”-style affair.
But most importantly, we’re enjoying every step of the process of improving “the conference experience,” both online and off. We welcome your feedback at tsc@thebdgway.com.
Voting for Talks
We recently integrated some software from The Social Collective to power the BIL Community. These new additions on our site allow you to connect with other BIL attendees and submit or vote on proposals for talks at BIL2009. Additionally, it allows you to discuss the conference (or whatever) using its own messaging mechanism that’s also mashed up with Twitter.
Just after launching the site, we received this great question:
John Larkin (thatlarkin): If the conference is self-organizing, why are you asking for speakers ahead of time?
First off, we should make it clear that anyone will be able to show up and give a talk the day of the conference. That being said, we learned some things from the last BIL Conference that we feel need fixing. (Refer to my blog for more information.)
At BIL2008, the talk schedule was done with a whiteboard and anyone could sign up for a time slot to give a talk. Within a few minutes, all the space for both days was already taken — if you hadn’t been there at the very start, you didn’t get to put your name on the list.
BIL 2009 will have much more space and we’re expecting many more people. We’re hoping people will submit their possible talks beforehand so they can spend some time preparing for their talk, as well as sharing with others the range of talks that will be at BIL. If our main room fills up (which holds about 1500 people), we would like to look towards the submitted topics to see which were most popular (through pageviews, comments and ‘favs’), and give them preference for the largest areas.
We will also have many smaller rooms that hold a little over 100 people each and these will feature the whiteboard signup like we did last year.
BIL is organized by the community. Does the community think there’s a better way to do this? I’ve voiced my opinions, now it’s time to hear yours. If you have any ideas as to how we can ensure the talks with the most interest make it to the biggest rooms, please share them in the comments.
New Website
BIL has a new web presence! Thanks to Always Creative for the design, Markup Ninjas for coding it, Bill Erickson for integrating Wordpress, and Downtown Cartel for hosting. Also, thanks to The Social Collective for our BIL Community site, which should be released in a few weeks. And of course, thanks to everyone who made comments and suggestions while we built this.
But, we still need the rest of the community to help out. The content of the site still needs some work. So we’ve put it in the wiki, and we’re hoping you can make suggestions for improvement.
It’s time to get ready for BIL 2009 in Long Beach February 7-8!
Singularity Summit
The Singularity Institute is holding the Singularity Summit, a dialog on the impact of dramatically accelerating technological change. The Singularity Institute was one of the early supporters of BIL, and an excellent forum for discussing world-changing ideas. The speakers and attendees of the Summit are the movers and shakers who will guide technological progress in the coming decades.
Saturday, October 25, 9am-5pm
Montgomery Theater, San Jose, CA
Aging 2008 with Aubrey de Grey
Aubrey de Grey was one of our most popular speakers at BIL. If you’re interested in his work on ending aging, you should definitely attend Aging 2008. Here’s an invitation from Aubrey himself.
Here’s the details:
What: Aging: The Disease, The Cure, The Implications, hosted by Methuselah Foundation
When: Friday, June 27, 2008, Drinks 4pm, Presentations 5pm, Dinner 8pm
Where: Royce Hall, 405 Hilgard Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Who:
- Dr. Bruce Ames, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UC Berkeley
- G. Steven Burrill, Chairman of Pharmasset and Chairman of Campaign for Medical Research
- Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Chairman and CSO of Methuselah Foundation and author of Ending Aging
- Dr. William Haseltine, Chairman of Haseltine Global Health
- Daniel Perry, Executive Director of Alliance for Aging Research
- Bernard Siegel, Executive Director of Genetics Policy Institute
- Dr. Gregory Stock, Director of Program on Medicine, Technology & Society at UCLA School of Medicine
- Dr. Michael West, CEO of BioTime and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley
Free Registration: www.mfoundation.org/ADCI
Sign up for BIL 2009
Now that we’re done with BIL 2008, it’s time to start planning BIL 2009
Sign up for BIL 2009. If you have any ideas on how to make BIL better, add it to this page too.
If you missed out on BIL 2008, read up on what everyone thought of it on the Blog Coverage Wiki Page.
BIL was a huge success!
Thanks everyone who came to BIL and made it such a huge success. We probably had 300 people there in total. Here’s some content from the event:
- Photos on Flickr
- Video - One Click Webcasting and Robert Scoble
Some information about the future:
- BIL2009 will be in Long Beach next year with TED. We will have a much bigger facility that can hold all those interested (guessing 500-1000). Add your name to the attendee list if you’re interested in attending: http://bilconference.pbwiki.com/BIL2009
- If you didn’t get one of the free BIL shirts, go to http://bilconference.com/bil-shirts/ and fill out the form to request one.
- We might have BIL:UK in a few months if there’s enough interest.
I look forward to seeing you all in Long Beach next year, if not sooner.
Thanks
