I love web conferences!

Wait, let's try that again: I love most things about web conferences. There are a few things I'm not entirely anamoured with.

Travel, for instance.

If you're lucky enough to always travel in Business Class and above, you may not empathize with me on this (and yes, I hate you very, very much, you lucky person!) For the rest of us mere mortals who lead existences that are mostly devoid of the comforts of airline lounges, priority checkin, and fully reclining seats, air travel is a different story.

Invariably it involves encounters with screaming, crying, and restlessly-seatback-kicking kids, rowdy football hooligans fans sporting day-old Eau de Beer, and the occasional person who would be far more at home if quarantined in the Highly Infectious Diseases Ward of a good research hospital instead of sitting next to you, coughing heartily in your general direction for the duration of the flight.

Needless to say, and much to my chagrin, all of the above are just a simple random sampling of real-world experiences from my various travels. When you travel as much as I do (I speak at, on average, a dozen or so conferences a year), air travel loses its novelty pretty quickly.

Not to mention that I'm painfully aware of my carbon footprint.

My own personal contribution to one of the biggest threats to human survival weighs quite heavily on my conscience. And I question the validity of carbon offsetting as a satisfactory solution.

Carbon offsetting may be highly therapeutic, but surely carbon avoidance (not pumping the carbon into the atmosphere in the first place) and carbon reduction are far better solutions for the environmental crisis that our species is facing.

And that means not taking that plane trip.

Unfortunately, today, not taking that plane trip equates to not attending that conference. But I love conferences! I love meeting new and interesting people, I love learning new things, and I love being exposed to new ideas. And yet, at what cost?

So, what do we do about a problem like Maria?

That Internet thing you do...

You've probably heard about that zany series of tubes that us geeky types get so excited about. I wonder if we could somehow use that darn-fangled contraption to solve this problem... Hmmm...

I think we can!

And that's how the idea for the Singularity web conference was hatched on a cold, dark, Winter's evening in England (are there any other type?) at the end of the last year.

Enchanté. Je m'appelle Singularity.

The premise for Singularity is simple: instead of making you come to the conference, let's make the conference come to you.

Let's build a conference that is at once global and local. And, let's make sure that we do not lose sight of the key aspects that we love about conferences: the social interactions, the conversations, the sense of community, the exchange of knowledge, and the forging of new friendships and opportunities.

How to build a global conference in three simple steps

So here's the plan. And if you want to copy it for your conference, please do so.

1. Build an online community where attendees and non-attendees alike can interact and get involved in the planning of the conference. Singularity is a read/write conference so you will ultimately determine the final form of the conference by participating in the community starting next month. This is one-half of the social side of the conference. The other half involves the local conference hubs.
2. Have attendees and speakers participate in the conference via local conference hubs around the world. These are local gatherings organized by local venue sponsors and local community groups such as user groups. This is the local element. It is the local conference hubs that make the conference truly global in scope and inject it with the real-world social element that is so crucial to a successful conference.
3. Use a proven technology stack and a solid hosting partner to deliver real-time sessions and interactivity. This is the technology element. For Singularity, Ayo Binitie and I are building a custom presentation application using Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server (FMIS), Flex, and Flash. It will ultimately be deployed on a cluster of FMIS instances capable of supporting 10,000 simultaneous connections. This monster infrastructure is being provided and supported by our awesome technology partner, Influxis. (Incidentally, Influxis have also been sponsoring our geek band, Phlash5, in its performances in Hollywood and Amsterdam this year -- you guys rock!)

And, needless to say, don't forget content, either! Without an excellent line-up of speakers, interesting sessions, and wonderful sponsors to support you, you don't have a conference, no matter how good your technology is.

Everything that's global is local again

The Internet has a natural tendency to isolate us even as it brings us closer together.

I can follow and interact with my friends from around the globe via the Internet's water-cooler that is Twitter but, I'm more than likely doing so while geographically isolated within the confines of my own room in the real world.

Local conference hubs are the remedy to this -- because the Internet is just as good at connecting local communities of people as it is in connecting individuals.

So the answer to "What is Singularity?" is this:

Singularity is a global web conference that links geographically-dispersed local communities in a common experience via the Internet.

Engage!

In July, we're getting ready to launch the new Singularity web site that I've been building in Python with Django and Google App Engine. You'll be hearing a lot more about my experiences with those technologies in later posts (in summary, I love 'em but it's an adventure to work with a technology like Google App Engine that is so cutting edge!)

We just released a teaser for the new web site where you can sign up to join the community, register your interest, and tell us where you're from (so we can better plan the conference schedule) and help us test the deployment environment on Google App Engine with real data and users. In the coming days we're going to unravel more of the new site, starting with ticket sales in July, and proceed to organize the local elements of the conference with the community via the site itself in a very public and visible way.

Now that you have a good idea what Singularity is and what our goals are, I'm looking forward to sharing with you the development process of the conference, the web site, its social aspects, and the development process of the real-time conference application. From time to time, I will be asking members of the Singularity team to write guest posts describing the areas that they are working on (Singularity is definitely not a one-person effort and I can't express how lucky I am to have the team that we have working on it.)

I'm going to share with you the challenges we face and how we overcome them. In short, I have no idea what I'm going to be writing about next! All I can promise you is that it is going to be an honest and open, play-by-play account of how we built the world's first global web conference.

It's been an adventure so far and it's only getting more exciting as we turn the dial to 11 on development in the remaining four-and-a-half months. I hope you'll join me for a fun roller-coaster ride in navigating the unknown and building not only a smashingly fine web conference but also -- I hope -- spearheading a new type of conference that will usher in an era of global conferences that are gentle on the Earth.