The programme committee for XTech 2008 oversees the creation of the schedule, drawing on the industry expertise of its members.
Chair
Edd Dumbill, Useful Information Company. Edd has chaired the XTech conference, and formerly XML Europe, since 2003. He is a technology writer, editor and software developer. Edd is currently creating the Expectnation conference organization system, and is the co-chair of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention.
Members
David Steinhardt, IDEAlliance. David is the President and CEO of IDEAlliance, the organizers of XTech. IDEAlliance is an established industry organization with a diverse and impressive membership that has been developing, educating and validating best practices in publishing and information technology for 40 years.
Gavin Bell, Nature Publishing Group. Gavin works for Nature Publishing Group, leading the development of social software products, such as Nature Network Boston and Nature Protocols.
Matt Biddulph, independent. Matt is a freelance software developer, specializing in the design of software systems for the internet. He has a particular interest in digital media, social software and data on the web.
Håkon Wium Lie, Opera Software. Håkon is Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software. His job is to make sure Opera remains a better, smaller and faster browser than the one you know. Also, he is a director of YesLogic, the company behind the PrinceXML web-to-PDF formatter. Before joining Opera in 1999, Håkon worked at W3C where he was responsible for the development of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a concept he first proposed while working with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1994. Håkon holds a MS degree in Visual Studies from the MIT Media Lab.
Eric van der Vlist, Dyomedea. Eric van der Vlist is a consultant specialized in XML and Web technologies and a member of the XML Guild. He has written the O’Reilly books “XML Schema” and “RELAX NG” and is a co-author of the books “Professional Web 2.0 programming” (WROX) and “Advanced XML applications” (Thomson). He created and maintains XMLfr, a French web site dedicated to XML.
Simon Willison. Simon Willison is a consultant on OpenID and client- and server-side Web development, and a co-creator of the Django Web framework. Before going freelance Simon worked on Yahoo!’s Technology Development team, and prior to that at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper