conference curation

I got an email this week from Russell Davies, one of the participants in this year's Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium, thanking me for my "conference organizing/curating." And I realized that he'd perfectly summed up the process of putting on an event like SCS. Yes, there's some organization...but more importantly, there's a lot of curation--choosing themes, picking the right people to speak about those themes, putting the content in an order that reveals a narrative.

For next year's event, I fully intend to have Moo cards printed up with the title "conference curator" on them. :)