Heads-up: Open Standards 2008 speakers and theme announced

I see the speakers for the Sydney, Australia, October Open Standards 2008 Conference have been announced: Jetty's Greg Wilkins and open source advocate Chris Messina (microformats, OAuth). The theme: Recognizing the Intersection between Open Standards and Open Source.

This is the 15th year of this conference, which started off as SGML Asia/Pacific in collaboration with the GCA (IDEAlliance). In recent times this conference was known as OASIS Open Standards, with a non-exclusive focus on OASIS standards and a less publishing-centric focus (i.e. more business-y), and I think this may have held back speakers on non-OASIS standards. They are also asking for people who want to showcase their open source software, as well as papers.

After all the travel last year, this year I am only speaking at conferences in Sydney: I have done presentations on PRESTO and Schematron at Open Publish (the twin sister conference of Open Standards) and Tech Ed (now that is a big enterprise), and I will be submitting a presentation for Open Standards.

I'd love to see presentations in particular relating to efforts with significant Australasian input (SAMBA, Google Maps, W3C SVG, LBA, etc)

[Update: There is a UK OASIS Open Standards Forum on Security Challenges for the Information Society at the end of the September near London.]