I've been invited to be a speaker at the 58th Annual Conference on World Affairs in April. Sean, a good friend I met on the IT conference circuit when I used to give a lot of talks, introduced me to the organizers of the conference and after speaking with them, they apparently think I'm a good fit. CWA isn't like most conferences. You don't prepare one or more a 60-90 minute talks. You suggest several potential issues to discuss which can touch on just about anything. A week or so before the conference, the organizers let you know which sessions you've been assigned to (which may or may not be the ones you suggested). Each session has four or more panelists that are suppose to talk for ~10 minutes on the topic. Then there is Q/A with the audience. It sounds pretty interesting and with the diverse set of speakers, including filmmakers, filmcritics (Roger Ebert), journalists, senators, writers, professors, musicians, and corporate exectutives, I couldn't turn it down.

From the CWA website:

"The University of Colorado's Conference on World Affairs was founded in 1948, originally as a forum on international affairs. CWA expanded rapidly to become a forum on Everything Conceivable encompassing music, literature, environmental activism, science, journalism, visual arts, diplomacy, technology, spirituality, the film industry, politics, business, medicine, human rights and so on.

Every year in April approximately 100 participants representing a wide range of backgrounds gather in Boulder a beautiful college town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains for what the New York Times calls a week-long extravaganza of discussion and debate on over 200 non-academic, cross-disciplinary panels, plenary sessions and performances.

The Conference challenges its participants to discuss a wide-range of issues on an impromptu basis offering a refreshing alternative to the specialized gatherings of academia and the business world. According to columnist Molly Ivins, CWA panels offer "...astonishing, cross-disciplinary insights, whole new ways of looking at old questions, and...information that can transform the way you look at things."

This article summarizes a report from Bowker that shows computer books represented only 3% of all new books in 2004. This is a continued download trend for computer books since the dot-com bust. I've also heard from various sources that computer book sales are not recovering to the level once anticipated. Not a great time to be a computer book author :-/

Startup School was a great way to spend a Saturday. I took ten pages worth of notes.

I had a great time at the MVP Summit last week. I got to meet a bunch of people in person that I had only known over email including Michael Smith, Laura Hunter, Al Mulnick, Darren Mar-Elia, Deji Akomolafe, Don Wells, Ulf B. Simon-Weidner, Rich Milburn, Brian Desmond, Carlos Magalhaes, and Joe Kaplan. Then there were all the people I'd met before in person but hadn't seen in a while including Tony Murray, Sean Deuby, Joe Richards, Dean Wells, Mark Minasi, Kevin Sullivan, and Gil Kirkpatrick.

Microsoft was a good host. Along with free room and meals, they provided bus service between hotels and meeting locations – although some people complained that the waits were really long. I had a car and only took the bus once with no problem.

Wednesday night a group of us including Sean Deuby, Mark Minasi, Darren Mar-Elia, Christa Anderson, and Michael Smith decided to skip the planned event at the football stadium for dinner downtown instead. It was a good time despite the hour or two we spent looking for a bar after dinner that Darren and Christa promised was right around the corner.

The first half of Thursday was for executive presentations and the latter half was Windows Server presentations. The VP of Communities said that over 1500 MVPs were in attendance from 71 countries. I overheard someone say that the MVP Summit is the largest Microsoft user conference hosted in Seattle. There are around 3000 MVPs in total. Steve Balmer presented next. This was my first Balmer experience. I've seen a lot of CEOs and executives speak in public before, but none come close to Balmer's vigor and passion. Balmer will be speaking at MIT later this month so that will give me a chance to see him again. Jim Alchin gave us a demo of Windows Vista and despite my earlier skepticism, some of the new features look very cool. Later in the day I caught a Monad session from Jeffrey Snover. The crowd was very excited by it which makes me continue to think our upcoming Monad book will do well.

Friday was full of meetings with the directory services product group. They are working on some interesting stuff, but nothing too surprising. Friday night they had a "party" at the EMP. I'm very familiar with the Frank Gehry building at MIT (Stata Center), so I wasn't surprised when I saw the Frank Gehry designed EMP. The food was good and the drinks were flowing. I didn't stay too long as I had to catch an early flight the next morning.

Overall, it was a good event and worth going to at least once.