Life beyond AoIR 2006

Well, the AoIR 2006 conference in Brisbane is over, and I'm slowly recovering... If I've been slow in updates to this blog in recent weeks, it's been simply because conference preparations had taken over my life - between running around to get things organised, dealing with last-minute registrations, changes, and other issues, and actually being there to make sure everything happened on the days as we'd planned it, there was very little time left for anything else (including luxuries like, say, sleep). Overall I'm very pleased with how it went, though, and we've had some great feedback on the conference - most importantly, I think we've proved that there is plenty of life outside of the North American and European conference circuits, and I hope that AoIR will continue its drive to engage with international communities of scholars. Asia, Latin America, South Africa - let's go!

As conference chair, of course I didn't get to see anything of the conference beyond my own panels, and the two keynotes. Slowly the reports from the conference are emerging, though, so I get to see a little more of it at last. My thanks especially to Kevin Lim, who not only blogged and photographed extensively at the conference, but also conducted a number of impromptu interviews at the closing reception - the video and some further discussion are over on Kevin's blog, but I've taken the liberty of also posting the video here...

Other coverage of the conference is across various blogs, and can be found most easily through Technorati; in addition to this, there is also the AoIR 2006 Flickr photostream.

Now, there's still a little more work to be done - for one thing, the conference budget wants to be finalised, and we're still chasing a couple of payments - but the worst of it is over. I'm really quite happy with the way it's turned out, and I especially have to congratulate our programme chair, Fay Sudweeks. Incidentally, the conference papers should be up on the AoIR Website in a couple of weeks or so.

I'll try to blog more regularly again from here on. Might even add a few backdated entries for events that happened in the meantime...

Technorati : AoIR2006, Association of Internet Researchers, Brisbane, Internet, conference
Del.icio.us : AoIR2006, Association of Internet Researchers, Brisbane, Internet, conference