We’re almost halfway between BIL:2009 and BIL:2010 and we thought it’d be a great idea to have a mid-year meetup to announce a few projects some BILders have been working on.

If you’re in San Francisco, join us at 21st Amendment on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 6PM. We want to get all previous and future BILders to come out and share their thoughts and perhaps get some work done.

Here’s the Facebook Event

• Livestream of Main Room (thanks Revision3) – http://revision3.com/bil/
• Livestream of all the event (thanks UStream) – http://www.ustream.tv/channel/bil-conference
• The Schedule – http://bilconference.com/schedule/ (view the Social Site for more details on the talks)
• The Wiki – http://bilconference.pbwiki.com

If you’re in Long Beach today come by the Venue at 3 p.m.  We’ll be meeting at the KBeach Radio station in the Student Union.  We’ll be working on kinds of things, so there will be something to do for everyone.

Directions Here.

The floor layout of BIL is important.  There are a total of 5 rooms (plus a snack area).  Talks in the 15 room (shown below in Red) will be 15 minutes long, very intense, no Q&A.  In the 30 room (Purple) talks will be 30 minutes, more interactive, more details.  The 45 room (shown in Turquoise) has talks that are, you guessed it, 45 minutes long, and will be more discussion/debate oriented.  The Infinity room (Blue) is open format, not sure exactly how this is going to work out.  The 2+2 room (Green) is the demo area for tech and art exhibits.

Downstairs is the pool hall, arcade, and bowling alley.  In the food court there’s a Subway and Carl’s Junior.

One of the more interesting parts of how unconferences work is the way they are organized and put on by the participants. Notice I said participants. The BIL Wiki is where most of the planning will take place through the end of BIL2009, Sunday. Volunteers are still needed for different event teams. The list of things we need is growing, so if you can help out or think of anything that hasn’t been addressed or thought about please don’t hesitate to contribute.

Likewise, the backchannel for the conference will be through two different twitter accounts: @bilorg and @bilvol.

There have been a few cancellations, and we left some buffer space… so we’re going to be able to accomodate all the wait-listed people so far.

It’s going to be tight… so bear with us.  We can’t have everyone in the same room at the same time, so at some point you may come across a point where a particular room is full.  There’s nothing we can do about it, so please be gracious if that happens.  With 90 speakers, there’s surely something going on worth seeing in one of the other rooms.

Last year we were similarly full, and there were only two points of about 15 minutes each where we had to turn people away from a particular room.  If there’s a speaker you REALLY want to see, make sure to get in the room about an hour before they talk. Speaking of which, we’ll have the final(ish) schedule going up Thursday morning.

If you’re a speaker, make sure you fill out the form on the Speaker Guidelines.

BIL belongs to all of the participants, and the best way you can express your involvement is by helping out. Volunteers are self-organizing on the wiki.

There’s something for everybody. If you’ve got a particular talent you’d like to contribute to the community feel free to post notes on the wiki.

The Volunteer Page

During the event we’ll be making requests real-time for tasks using twitter.  Follow @BILvol and if you’re available keep your eye on it.  It’s a retweet account, so if you need a volunteer just tweet out your request @BILvol and others will see it.  This is kind of an experiment, so bear with us.

It’s time to start making the schedule.  Here’s a starting point for the format, I’d like to hear your ideas.

BIL will have probably 80 speakers and 4 rooms.  We need to spread the speakers between the rooms.  There the Main Room with 450 seats, the Middle Room with 55 seats, and two Small Rooms with 20 seats.

How about…
Main room – 15 minute talks.
Middle room – 30 minute talks.
Small room 1 – Flexible time, not to exceed 45 minutes.
Small room 2 – Demo Room.

The way I envision it is in the main room people give intense, polished and short presentations.  In the middle room are for more technical subjects which are of interest to a smaller group of people, but there’s more desire to go in-depth.  The small room is for more round-table discussions and debate.  As for Question and Answer, there’s a lot of public space, gorgeous patios and lawns where conversations can run for hours.

What do you think?

We just had our 70th speaker sign up. Super ‘Hello World’ Experience.  The presenter, Joseph Adams, will be doing hands-on 1-on-1 tutorials which will allow you to run your own software on Arizona State University’s Saguaro high-performance computer (even if you are a noob, he’ll start with “Hello World”).  What do you have to say in four trillion computations per second (two teraflops)?

Which brings me to the point… Joseph and others are doing ‘hands-on’ demos rather than talks.  BIL will have a room where you can bring your awesome art or technology and show it to others.  So it looks like we’ll have people from the San Diego Fab Lab, MindShare, ASU High-Performance Computing, SDSU VizLab, and more.

If you’d like to demo your tech or art at BIL, post it as a talk and add in the description it will be an interactive demo.  If you have unique requirements (more than a few feet of table space, electricity, internet, whatever) shoot a quick note to HuffmanTM@gmail.com.