Oxford Geek Night 15: open government and web marketing

OGN15 is in a bit over a week's time, on Wednesday 25 November. It promises to be a great evening as usual, with varied keynote and microslot talks and the usual Oxford(shire) geek chat and networking.

Interestingly, we've ended up with common threads through the two quite different keynote talks. Fintan Galvin, who's talking about the semantic web and its effect on marketing strategies on the web we're more at home with, will be explaining how the former will change the way we think about such priorities as SEO with regard to the latter; along the way he'll be mentioning Drupal, which is an ideal solution to a whole host of web content problems. Meanwhile, Jeni Tennison will talk about a new initiative in open UK government, data.gov.uk, which is currently in closed beta and uses a complex stack of technologies including... Drupal and RDF! RDF takes centre stage in the forthcoming Drupal 7 release, so more by luck than judgment our common topic is a pretty hot one.

Of course there's microslots and the Pitch too---contact me if you want to volunteer for the sixty-second open-mic Pitch, as we've still got some spare slots---and we've got sponsorship to make sure the whole evening is not just free as in beer, but free as in... other beverages that are available. The Guardian Open Platform are sponsoring drinks again, and Apress have promised us some books for the book raffle. Torchbox is as usual very kindly sponsoring my time, venue costs and infrastructure for the night. Thanks to all our sponsors for their generosity.

Almost everything is in place, which means I might get away with a few days off before the night, but I promise to turn up on the 25th fit and rested. Assuming I'm not still stranded in Birmingham New Street. But then how likely is that, really?