The 2010 Mesh Conference – the fifth one – takes place at Toronto’s MaRS Collaboration Centre on Tuesday, May 18th and Wednesday, May 19th. Its organizers call it “Canada’s Web Conference”, and it is: it’s this country’s premier get-together for creatives, techies and “suits” to share ideas about the internet and how it affects how we work, live and play.

This Year’s Keynote Speakers

This year’s keynote speakers are:

Chris Thorpe, Developer Advocate for the Open Platform at The Guardian

His background as a research scientist and his early involvement in Open Access publishing, makes him fascinated and passionate about what happens when data, content, platforms, identity and pretty much anything opens up. He spends his time at The Guardian working on the best ways to integrate The Guardian’s content, data and APIs with other people’s technology and businesses as part of the drive towards building the distribution and engagement channels of a mutualized newspaper.

Joseph Menn, author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet, Menn’s third book, was published in the US in January 2010 and in the UK in February 2010 by PublicAffairs Books. Part true-life thriller and part expose, it became an immediate bestseller, with Menn interviewed on national television and radio programs in the US, Canada and elsewhere. Menn has spoken at major security conferences on his findings, which include hard evidence that the governments of Russia and China are protecting and directing the behavior of some of the world’s worst cyber-criminals.

Scott Thompson, President of PayPal

Scott Thompson is president of PayPal with overall responsibility for establishing PayPal as the leading global online payment service. Scott previously served as PayPal’s senior vice president and chief technology officer, where he oversaw information technology, product development and architecture for PayPal.

Arvind Rajan, Vice President, International at LinkedIn

Arvind Rajan leads the company’s initiatives in markets outside the United States and Europe. Prior to joining LinkedIn, Arvind was the CEO of Grassroots Enterprise. Also a co-founder of the company, Arvind developed pioneering online grassroots communications programs for a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies, trade associations and nonprofit organizations. Arvind began his career with the Boston Consulting Group, and has held a wide range of leadership positions in emerging growth technology companies.

This Year’s Topics

Mesh will have two days’ worth of sessions covering a number of topics, including:

• Open Government
• Mobile phones and computing
• The Pirate’s Dilemma
• Privacy in the age of Facebook
• Real-time
• Social media in the Olympics, in the newsroom, as used by Médecins Sans Frontières and your business

For more, see the schedule.

Who’s Behind Mesh?

Mesh is a great example of the sort of thing that engaged and enthusiastic communities can create. It wasn’t created by a professional conference-organizing company, software vendor or government program, but by these five individuals known through the Toronto tech scene:

• Mark Evans: Digital marketing and social media consultant, former VP at my old company, b5media, worked with the startups PlanetEye and Blanketware, and former tech journo with the National Post and Globe and Mail.
• Mathew Ingram: Senior writer with GigaOm, former tech journo with the Globe and Mail and supreme tech blogger-about-town.
• Mike McDerment: Runs Freshbooks, one of Toronto’s most successful start-ups.
• Rob Hyndman: If (or more likely, when) I get sued, I’ll haul ass for Rob’s office! Considered by the Toronto tech scene to be its unofficial legal advisor, Rob runs Hyndman | Law, a boutique law firm catering to tech companies.
• Stuart McDonald: Runs Tripharbor/Tripharbour; in a former life, he brought Expedia to Canada.

And of course, there are the sponsors, which includes Microsoft Canada. I’ll be there, representing The Empire along with my coworkers David Crow, Barnaby Jeans and John Oxley.

Get Your Tickets Now!

There’s not much time left before Mesh, and tickets are going quickly. The student tickets are already gone, but a few regular tickets — CAD$539 each – are still available at the registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

MeshU – short for “Mesh University” – takes place on Monday, May 17th at the MaRS Collaboration Centre (101 College Street, just east of University). It’s a series of workshops for web designers, developers and “suits” that takes place the day before the Mesh Conference (“Canada’s Web Conference”) and will feature 12 workshops divided into “Design”, “Development” and “Management” streams delivered by people with real-world startup/tech business experience.

I’ll be there, as both an attendee furiously taking notes (which I’ll post here) as well as a representative of Microsoft Canada and Silverlight, who are MeshU’s event partners.

Keynote: Bill Buxton

Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, human-computer interaction guru extraordinaire and fellow alumnus of Crazy Go Nuts University, will deliver the morning keynote. Every presentation I’ve ever seen him do has always inspired me and given me at least three new ideas, and I expect that this one will be no different. He’s an intelligent, engaging and interesting speaker – don’t miss your chance to see him live!

MeshU Sessions

Here are the MeshU sessions:

• Design Track
  • Principles of Design – Meredith Noble (Usability Matters)
  • [Untitled] – Asa Raskin (Mozilla)
  • [Untitled] – Adrian Belina (Jam3Media)
• Developer Track
  • Data Chemistry – Chris Thorpe (The Guardian)
  • [Untitled] – Diana Clarke (FreshBooks)
  • Scaling Your Tech Teams – Joe Stump (SimpleGeo)
  • Lean Product Development: Learning is the Killer Feature – Dan Martell (FlowTown)
• Management Track
  • The Agony and the Ecstasy: Building and Scaling Inside Sales – Isaac Garcia (Central Desktop)
  • Customer Milestones to Startup Success – Sean Ellis (12in6)
  • How (and Why) to Build a Data Warehouse 101 – Antony Upward (Edward James Consulting)
  • Hiring Mistakes: A How-To Guide – Ben Baldwin (Clearfit.com)

Registering for MeshU

Alas, the $49.00 student tickets for MeshU are sold out. Here’s what remain:

• Regular tickets: CAD$289.00 each
• “Friends of MeshU” sponsorship: CAD$1000 each – with this, you get:
  • 1 regular ticket
  • 1 student ticket
  • Your logo on the MeshU site and at the event
• “Really Good Friends of MeshU” sponsorship: CAD$2000 each — with this, you get:
  • 2 regular tickets
  • 2 student tickets
  • Your logo on the MeshU site and at the event
  • A table at the event

To register for MeshU, go to the MeshU registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It looks as thought the Twitter user going by the handle of betbot is going to spend the next little while absorbing a very important lesson about managing one’s online persona after making this tweet at the Mesh Conference:

betbot’s profile vaingloriously proclaims that he has three Master’s degrees:

Self-proclaimed marketing guru trying to put my 3 hard-earned Masters to work

If you;ve spent any time on a university campus, you know that having that many Master’s degrees is not a boasting point; it’s a cry for help – it means you’re a shiftless pedant majoring in life-avoidance studies. As for putting “marketing guru” in your Twitter profile; it’s a cliche on par with “I like long walks on the beach” in the personal ads.

This morning at the Mesh 2009 Conference, Microsoft’s Mark Relph (my boss’ boss) and OCAD President Sara Diamond announced a Microsoft/OCAD partnership. Microsoft will provide OCAD with a Surface tabletop computer along with software and support (which includes training and courses by Infusion Development, who know a lot about developing software for the Surface).

We’re providing OCAD with a Surface development unit along with Visual Studio and other developer tools related to building software for it. The Surface will be put in OCAD’s Digital Media Research + Innovation Institute, whose first phase is currently under construction. It’ll be used as a tool within the school’s -disciplinary Digital Futures Initiative (DFI) program, whose goals include establishing a research and innovation laboratory for interactive design, art and digital media.

Mark Relph writes:

Microsoft Surface will help OCAD students, faculty and researchers to apply interactive technology to their work in digital media, art and design.  In conjunction with our partner Infusion Development, we will be directly engaged with teaching students how to harness the power of these new technologies.  This is only the start – in the years ahead we’ll be bringing in our technology and design experts to OCAD to help further strengthen this relationship. Our focus will not just be on the Surface technologies – as we move into a world where the interaction with software will depend on new user experiences like touch, speech and other capabilities it is critical that we prepare the next generation of software designers and experience experts.

As programmers, engineers and techies, we at Microsoft can come up with all sorts of interesting uses and applications for Surface, but we can’t come up with all of them. We feel that the students at OCAD, who have a strong bent towards design, will come up with some interesting ideas and applications that would never occur to us whose bent is towards geekery. Having worked at a job where OCAD graduates were the majority, I can say from experience that there’s a certain “something” that you get from design-oriented minds that you don’t get from engineering-oriented minds. You can see that “something” in Apple’s products, and it’s something I’d like to see more of from The Empire.

The schedule for the 2009 Mesh Conference, “the little Canadian web conference that could”, has been posted. Mesh takes place on April 7th and 8th at the MaRS Collaboration Centre in downtown Toronto and is preceded by MeshU workshop event on April 6th.

Friends of mine who’ll be presenting at MeshU include:

• Leigh Honeywell of Hacklab.TO: Break It to Make It: Writing (More) Secure Software
• Pete Forde, Unspace: Is That an iPhone in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

There are a number of presentations by other folks at MeshU – go look at the schedule to see which ones appeal to you.

As for Mesh itself, there will be keynotes over its two days by the following people:

• Michael Masnick, founder and CEO of Floor64
• Jessica Jackely, co-founder of Kiva.org
• Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo.com
• Scott Monty, marketing, communications and social media guy
• David Miller, Mayor of Toronto

A few people I know will be doing presentations at Mesh:

• Mark Evans will have a one-on-one conversation with David Usher, billed as “one of Canada’s most social media-friendly musicians” and a workshop titled How to Integrate Social Media into Your Marketing Plan
• Sacha Chua will be heading up a talk with a panel featuring John Philip Green titled How the Web is Changing the Way We Learn
• Torontoist’s David Topping and Spacing’s Matthew Blackett will be on a panel called Hyper-Local Media: Does It Work?
• Andrew Cherwenka will be running the Social Media 101 workshop
• Mathew Ingram will lead The Future of News panel
• Darren Barefoot will lead a panel featuring Duarte Da Silva titled Using Social Media for Good
• Stuart McDonald will lead a panel titled Managing Your Ad Buy
• Howard Lindzon will be on the What’s on the Horizon? panel discussion
• Jevon McDonald will moderate the Benefits and Risks of Building for a Platform discussion
• Sean Moffitt and Saul Colt will be in the Using Online Word of Mouth panel
• Rob Hyndman will lead the Legal Bootcamp for Web Startups workshop
• My manager’s manager, Mark Relph, will chair the Managing Community Online panel

For more details, see the Mesh schedule.

Registration for Mesh costs CAD$492.50; registration for MeshU costs CAD$289.00.