We are once again in the heart of the planning season for the DotNetNuke DevConnections and SDC conferences. It is that time of year when we ask all of you to submit your session abstracts for this years DotNetNuke North American conference.  Later this week we’ll be opening up the official Call for Speakers on DotNetNuke.com, but I wanted to take the opportunity to give speakers a heads up so they could start preparing their abstracts so that they are ready once we open the submission form.  Like the last three years, we are accepting  session submissions in 4 different topic areas:  Development, Design, Administration and Open Source.

Development – These are basically session dealing with code.  Whether it is topic on module development or building custom providers or dissecting the internals of DotNetNuke, anything that would appeal to the software coders is fair game.

Design – This topic area is targeted at the web designers.  This goes beyond just talking about skins.  It also includes topics like SEO, and accessibility and can even include Localization.  These sessions should focus more on the aesthetic and usability aspects of building a DotNetNuke website.

Administration – This topic area is where speakers present sessions that address the needs of the end user.  How do they install DotNetNuke, how do they configure it for a Web Farm or to run in the cloud(this is different that writing a module that uses cloud services), how can they improve site performance.  These sessions really focus on the day to day use and administration of running a DotNetNuke website.  This topic area is also a catchall for any business related topics.

Open Source – This final topic area is designed to show attendees how they can incorporate other Open Source tools into their development, design and administration tasks.  It might be a topic on using Watin for testing or using GIMP and Paint.Net for creating your skin elements.  The idea here is to expand the attendees view of the Open Source community and to bring in fresh and complimentary ideas from other Open Source projects.  These sessions should still be relevant to DotNetNuke in a very meaningful way.  A topic showing all the wonders of using Wordpress for blogging is not appropriate.

Yesterday, announcements went out to speakers who submitted sessions for DotNetNuke OpenForce North America.  During the call for speakers we received almost 200 entries and 70 speakers.  Obviously, everyone cannot speak and making the selections was extremely difficult.  We appreciate all of the input we received which made our task both easier and more difficult.  Easier in that there were lots of great topics to choose from so getting good coverage across all the tracks was relatively simple, and more difficult in that we knew that we would have to eliminate many great topics and speakers.

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Once again the DotNetNuke community will be heading off to Las Vegas in November for the annual DotNetNuke OpenForce North America conference.  We are looking for a handful of people who want free hotel accommodations and conference admission.  All you have to do is get selected to be a speaker.  You know you have a lot of great insight and knowledge of DotNetNuke and would love to share it with the DotNetNuke community.  Well today is your last chance to turn in your speaker submissions for the North American conference.  Just go to the OpenForce homepage at http://www.openforce09.com...

We are once again in the heart of the planning season for DotNetNuke OpenForce. It is that time of year when we ask all of you to submit your session abstracts for this years OpenForce North America conference.  I know that the last 2 years, we have had great response from our community and I expect that this year will be no different.

Like the last two years, we are accepting  session submissions in 4 different topic areas:  Development, Design, Administration and Open Source.

Development – These are basically session dealing with code.  Whether it is topic on module development or building custom providers or dissecting the internals of DotNetNuke, anything that would appeal to the software coders is fair game.

Design – This topic area is targeted at the web designers.  This goes beyond just talking about skins.  It also includes topics like SEO, and accessibility and can even include Localization.  These sessions should focus more on the aesthetic and usability aspects of building a DotNetNuke website.

Administration – This topic area is where speakers present sessions that address the needs of the end user.  How do they install DotNetNuke, how do they configure it for a Web Farm or to run in the cloud(this is different that writing a module that uses cloud services), how can they improve site performance.  These sessions really focus on the day to day use and administration of running a DotNetNuke website.  This topic area is also a catchall for any business related topics.

Open Source – This final topic area is designed to show attendees how they can incorporate other Open Source tools into their development, design and administration tasks.  It might be a topic on using XUnit for testing or using GIMP and Paint.Net for creating your skin elements.  The idea here is to expand the attendees view of the Open Source community and to bring in fresh and complimentary ideas from other Open Source projects.  These sessions should still be relevant to DotNetNuke in a very meaningful way.  A topic showing all the wonders of using Wordpress for blogging is not appropriate.

It doesn’t seem like it was all that long ago that I was walking down the halls at the Mandalay Bay convention center and seeing the DotNetNuke OpenForce registration booth for the first time.  Last year was definitely an exciting time to be at OpenForce.  It was our first conference so no-one was quite certain what to expect.  The one thing I can say for sure is that it everyone who I spoke with, came away with a renewed sense of excitement and energy.

We are once again in the final stretch for the OpenForce conference.  Speakers are making the final tweaks to what I am certain will be another set of outstanding presentations. Exhibitors are busy making last minute updates to their booths.  Most of the planning is complete and we are just wrapping up the last little details.