Program planning is now underway for the UniForum '96 Conference and Exposition, scheduled for Feb. 12-16 in San Francisco. The 19-member UniForum '96 Program Committee has been appointed and has held its first meeting to determine the content of the conference and keep the topics on the leading edge of open systems technology.
For the third straight year, the program is being planned by a committee of high-level representatives from the vendor, end-user, and analyst communities, as well as UniForum itself and its conference management partner, Softbank Comdex. "This kind of committee brings fresh ideas to the process, and we tend to go more out on the edge," says David Bernstein, committee chairperson. "A management team would tend to pick just the safe topics."
The process consists of first considering UniForum's basic mission, which is to educate the open systems community through the delivery of the latest technical information available. Then the committee does an in-depth review of comments from the previous year's conference, to learn what worked and what didn't. "We spend a lot of time with the evaluation forms and the statistics," Bernstein says. "Also, we don't consider modestly-attended topics necessarily a failure." Next, the committee decides what the end-user's technical dilemmas are and how to help solve them. Finally, the group considers what the hottest topics will be at the time of the next conference.
"We're going to try to deliver what's hot in 1996," Bernstein says. "The team takes it very seriously and knows it takes a lot of hard work to get really high-quality speakers to commit their time and energy to the program."
The committee members are: