Northern Voice 2007

Due to the overwhelmingly positive feedback from attendees to Northern Voice 2006 and Northern Voice 2005 we’ve decided to bring it back again for 2007.

For those of you who are unfamiliar (gasp!) Northen Voice is an independant and grassroots personal publishing conference based here in Vancouver. Think internet, photography, audio, video, blogs, games, mobile. Think passion, creativity, geekery and community.

Planning has been underway for months and we’ve just opened speaker submissions for Northern Voice 2007. Here’s what Boris has to say about all that:

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.

Much thanks to my fellow organizers Darren, Brian, Cyprien, Lauren, Boris and Roland as well as the many friends of Northern Voice and volenteers that help to make this thing so fun and a big success.