We can now announce it! The first-ever Evergreen Conference will be May 20-22, 2009 at the Classic Center in Athens, Georgia, following the Georgia PINES annual meeting. The Classic Center is commodiou
s and lovely, and Athens, just an hour from Atlanta, is a fun place with a nice downtown just in walking distance from the Center.
The Evergreen Conference is being planned by Georgia Public Library Service, SOLINET, and Equinox Software.
What to expect
The details are still being worked out, but expect a lively mix of speakers, lightning talks, Birds of a Feather (topic discussions organized on-site), and of course, a hackfest! To encourage mingling and sharing, plenty of time will be factored in for breaks and meals.
Hackfest joy!
Hackfest-types: it’s reasonable to assume that May 20 will be a full-day hackfest opportunity. (For those unfamiliar with this term, a “hackfest” is a time for developers to get together and work like mad on projects, like the Evergreen SOPAC and LibX projects worked on at Access 2008.) The hackfest may overlap with PINES meeting activities on the 20th, but we’re anticipating that’s not an issue.
Lightning Strikes — Twice, Thrice, Many Times!
The Evergreen Conference will also likely feature the increasingly-popular lightning talks (sometimes called Thunder Talks or Five-Minute Madness). This weekend at LITA Forum someone commented that she learned more from lightning talks than from longer sessions. Perhaps when people only have 5 minutes to present, they get focused.
The conference might also solicit lightning-talk topics online in advance, or offer a mix of pre-submitted topics and on-site reports. (Access 2008 did a particularly nice job of incorporating Hackfest reports into its schedule.)
What else? Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Pecha Kucha? Time set aside for an Evergreen Maypole Dance?