Heading to Mobilism 2013

A week from now I’ll be on a plane heading to Amsterdam for the excellent Mobilism conference. This is year three for them, and you only need to take one look at this year’s program to see just how incredible the event is going to be. The lineup is full of great speakers with fantastic topics to discuss! Just as impressive is the list of attendees—there’s sure to be some great discussions with a group like this all in one place.

This will be my first time hanging out at Mobilism and I couldn’t be more excited. When I was involved with BDConf, we always saw Mobilism as being very similar: a conference that aimed to push the envelope on the discussion of the web on mobile and other emerging devices.

I’ll be playing the role of MC this year. They’re going to use a different style of Q&A where instead of trying to run a mic back and forth across the room, attendees can post their questions to Twitter (using a hashtag that will be mentioned frequently at the conference) throughout the talk. When the speaker is finished with their presentation I’ll interview them on stage using the questions the audience sent in.

Christian Heilmann has blogged about this approach in the past and the format not only sounds fun, but makes a ton of sense as well. It’s a great way to allow attendees to ask questions as they think of them instead of having to try and remember them for the end of the talk. As Christian also pointed out, you actually have more questions answered because you don’t have to wait while someone runs back and forth with the microphone.

If you’re in town for the conference be sure to post lots of interesting questions to discuss! You won’t have to stand in front of a mic in the middle of the room so there’s really no reason at all to be shy.

And if you haven’t signed up yet, they’ve still got some tickets available for both the conference and workshops (including a dirt cheap price for a full-day of Firefox OS and BB10 development).

As a bonus, you can follow Mobilism with WebPerfDays, an unconference about performance the day after Mobilism. It looks like quite a few people from Mobilism (including myself) will be hanging around to check it out and I’ve heard rumblings of some great discussions in the works (including a much-needed chat about responsive images).