This week is the last before I hop on a plane a head over to The Venetian in Las Vegas for this year’s IBM IMPACT conference. I’ve been privileged to attend the last few of these customer and user conferences, and I’m always happy to have the opportunity to meet users and techies, as well as to talk to new folks about what is happening in the WebSphere Messaging portfolio.
This year I’ve been given the task of talking about what’s new in WebSphere MQ (hint: if you look at the whole WMQ family, there is a lot going on); and to talk about our Smarter Planet protocol, also known as MQ Telemetry Transport.
As before, we have a social aggregator where you can follow the conference. One particularly exciting addition this year is the idea that we’ll run an unconference within IMPACT itself, and we’ve carved out the Thursday in order to do so. If you’ve never been to an unconference before, the concept is that the organisers put up the venue, framework, and support, and the attendees build up the actual agenda. The call for participation is open now… if you are really a techie or an architect and don’t want to be bored by the business-oriented stuff, you need to be at the unconference. It’s for developers, by developers (actually – that’s YOU).
The ideas will be posted at Impact 2011 April 11-13 using the wall grid posted onsite, where you can continue to submit and vote on ideas. The Unconference is held on April 14th from morning through afternoon. Sessions will run about 1 hour with several rooms open during each time block. The kick-off is at 8:30AM with a special guest speaker. The format of sessions is up to speaker(s) to decide – go solo, pair up or make a roundtable with a group. Make it your own.
There’s a slightly different way of doing things here, as instead of only having folks nominate themselves to present on the day, we’ve got a forum where you can suggest and vote on topics right now.
If you don’t believe that this thing is going to be “the place to be” on the Thursday of IMPACT, here’s what I actually consider the second best part (apart from the conversations with developers themselves): RedMonk. The guys are going to be all over the Unconference, including a keynote by James Governor, and a breakout session with Stephen O’Grady. Listen to @monkchips:
James Governor: Developers should be excited. The pendulum is swinging back… you are the new kingmakers, so what are you going to do about it?
For more on the unconference, you need to be following Ryan Boyles and Kathleen Holm. Oh, and if you’re coming to IMPACT, and you use Twitter, give Lanyrd a try – it’s a great way of sharing what you’re up to.
