I just announced over on O’Reilly Radar that Steve Souders and I will be co-chairing Velocity, the new O’Reilly conference dedicated to Web Performance and Operations. Velocity is happening on June 23-24, 2008 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, California.

Our theme is “Fast, Scalable, Resilient, Available”. We’re focusing on the crucial skills and knowledge needed by people who are building successful websites. This is the conference that many of us have wanted for a long time, and I’m really excited to help make it happen.

The Call for Participation for Velocity 2008 is open. Please the Velocity Proposals page for more details on submitting sessions. The submission deadline for all proposals is January 3, 2008.

Along with subscribing to the official RSS feed you can join the Facebook group and Upcoming event. Please use velocity08 when tagging.

Technorati Tags: conferences, infrastructure, innovation, operations, oreilly, performance, scale, velocity08, web2.0, webops

I am at FooCamp getting to hang out with a few friends and talking about technology, emergency management, and finance. I’ve pimped Swivel, BarCampBankSeattle, and Black Rock Federal where it’s been appropriate, gave a “FooCamp Survival Guide” lightning talk, and am giving a talk tomorrow on Designing for Disaster & DisasterCamp

Designing for Disaster & DisasterCamp

Date: Sunday, June 24

Time: 11:00 - 12:00
Location: jackal (tent)
Track:“Another F***ing Growth Opportunity”

The first part of this talk will cover a few (painful/entertaining/instructive) lessons I’ve learned from emergency management and humanitarian aid. We’ll then talk about how these apply to you and the technologies you design.

Then we’ll talk about DisasterCamp, a project to provide training and operational experience under realistic conditions… (AKA: “hazing the n00bs”).

I leave here tomorrow and fly out to meet the Swivel Team in Turkey for the OECD World Economic Forum.

Mikel Maron posted a great followup to my web2.0 expo talk, explaining the extent of the problem in more detail as well as discussing what is being done to fix it. (link to a pdf of my slides)

The example I gave in my talk was how the Red Cross couldn’t navigate after Katrina because they depended on Google Maps, which was (and still is) out of date. The bridge was destroyed, but Google (and Yahoo, and your mapping GPS, etc) all say it’s still there.

“It’s not just Google, but every major web mapping provider that’s out of date. Here is Yahoo giving directions over the bridge. The issue is with the data providers, Navteq and TeleAltas, whose business processes insert huge delays between reality and its representation catching up. Yes, there are efforts right now to rebuild the physical bridge, but that doesn’t excuse a huge obvious mistake from persisting for over 1.5 years.

This model of collecting and distributing mapping data is fundamentally broken. Basic geo-information about this world is too important and changing too fast to be in the hands of closed off corporations. Of course, there is another way, where the loop between users of data and contributors of data is closed (in an open way), and where the time data was collected and updated is transparent.”

I highly recommend checking out his blog!

I’m giving a talk at the Web2.0Expo on Wednesday called “Failures, Disasters, & Resilient Design“. I’ll be using some of the lessons-learned from our deployment and how they apply to managing technology.

Failures, Disasters, & Resilient Design
(Click here for ExpoCal!)

Jesse Robbins, ex-Amazon, OpenAid

Track: Web Operations
Date: Wednesday, April 18
Time: 4:30pm - 5:20pm
Location: 2008

This talk reviews real world examples of complex systems failure and how they relate to Web 2.0. Drawing on his work as the “Master of Disaster” at Amazon and using examples from Nuclear Power to his own experiences after Hurricane Katrina, Jesse will provide:

• A methodology for managing risk with Web 2.0 technologies.
• Best practices for building Resilient Systems with Web Services & Web Scale Computing
• Stories and pictures of things blowing up!

Here’s the full-version of one of my slides:

Many, many thanks to the folks at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony Conference, who are sponsoring Free-Tel: Calls For Change. I’ll be there.

Free-Tel: Calls For Change is a one-day miniconference bridging emerging telephony applications and social change. A series of talks and workshops targeting Activists, Advocacy, Fundraisers, and Organizers will be held by Technical Innovators who have been successfully using telephone networks as a powerful tool for social change. A wide breadth of tools will be covered, from traditional membership communication, Get Out The Vote, and call centers, to more recent tools and technologies such as Web 2.0 applications, VoIP, polling, and SMS. The community is invited to brainstorm, discuss needs of advocacy organizations, and share skills in building out these systems. http://www.callsforchange.orgCalls For Change will be held in conjunction with O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony Conference February 27th to March 1st.

When February 27th

Where San Francisco Airport Marriott

Who Activists, Advocates, and Organizers working for social change will meet with and collaborate with Techies who will have been using the the phone system for social change.

What The day will be divided up in to two sections, a morning of presentations about campaigns which have successfully used the phone system (mobile, voip, and landline). We will have presentations on some of the applications which have been built for these campaigns.

The afternoon will be devoted to workshops to evaluate the needs of advocacy organizations and technical workshops to share skills in building out the systems.

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