Submitted by Dale on February 25, 2008 - 12:38pm
Northern Voice is finished for another year and we had awesome sessions! And talented/awesome participants, the moose mosaic was produced by Duane Story from 1600 of the some 2700 Flickr photos taken.
It doesn't seem that long ago I was seated at a table with the other organizers in the speaker/session selection process. We had a great batch of submissions to pick from, which is exactly the situation to be in, but with the downside we couldn't accept all the sessions we wanted. There was much discussion around number of tracks, session length, over-all day length. So many trade-offs. This is a great bunch of people to work with and I witnessed one of the smoothest journeys to consensus I have ever seen in a room with more than four people in it (including Darren and Julie with a virtual presence from Malta!).
Of course there were bumps along the way. There always is. Hiccups with the web site because of misbehaving software, teething pains with payment gateways, last minute venue details big and small (we did try to get a coat rack this year, honest) and sadly, rubber duck fratricide. Did I mention the organizing committee is a great bunch of people to work with? All these issues and more were handled with grace-under-fire. And then the day of the conference was here.