Last Chance to Speak at Flashforward Boston
We’ve had many excellent proposals for Flashforward2007 Boston so far — you may have noticed that we got excited and accepted a few speakers already — but this Friday we’ll close the submission form. So this is your last chance to pitch your ideas for this event! (And if you already submitted your ideas, thank you! Please bear with us just a bit longer as we wait for the final proposals to come in.)
Image derived from alykat’s photo of Lawrence Lessig. All her pictures of FF06 Seattle are worth checking out!
May 22nd, 2007 at 7:22 am
I know of several that attempted to submit to be a speakers at FFWD 07′ and were turned down. All of which helped my decide to not attend flash forward 07 as previously planned.
for perhaps $200-300 less you can attend Flash on the Beach with much better speakers.
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:17 am
Steve, we haven’t turned _anyone_ down yet for Flashforward2007. We certainly will — we receive enough good proposals to hold three conferences — but that’s just a matter of making decisions. Even when everything on a menu sounds tasty, there’s still only so much a person can eat! As for “much better speakers” — please wait to judge that until we’ve posted our final lineup (less than half have been announced so far.) Sorry you won’t be joining us this year, but please give us another try in ‘08!
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:12 am
I didnt mean to suggest that the speakers at FFWD are not good, its just that only 1 of the 5 that I want to attend sessions of, are speaking at FFWD.
As for the turning down speakers, my understanding from a friend was that they were turned down because his proposal was deemed too “open source”.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:49 am
Fair enough, but like I said, we’re not done choosing ours yet, so it’s not really a fair comparison at this point.
Re: a proposal that’s “too open-source” — it’s possible we turned down his proposal for a different event (like I said, we haven’t sent out any rejections for Boston yet) but we don’t normally detail the thinking behind a rejection unless asked. We normally stick to the (true) position that the number of excellent proposals was greater than the number of available slots.
Having said all that, this could be a valid reason for not choosing a topic, especially this year. With so many new releases coming out of Adobe, we feel it’s worth covering those in a solid way first and foremost, then spending the remaining sessions on a subset of the other interesting proposals we receive. With that philosophy in mind, we do not have enough sessions to properly treat EVERY worthwhile open-source Flash project, though we will certainly pick a few. (I’d tell you which ones here, but I haven’t told the speakers they’ve been accepted yet — stay tuned!)
It’s obvious to us how important the open-source contributions are to the Flash ecosystem, and clearly Adobe thinks so too, or they wouldn’t have open-sourced Flex. I honestly think there’s an argument to be made for a mostly or entirely open-source Flash event, but it probably won’t happen at Flashforward, because a high percentage of our attendees expect solid training in the official Adobe tools.
But we’ll always cover a selection of developments in the open source world as well, and if anyone feels we’re missing something obvious, please tell us! No one can be an expert in everything, so we rely on the community to help us steer this ship.