Conference Wrap-up Talks

Michael Sperberg-McQueen gave a closing talk (a conference wrap-up) at every Balisage conference, every Extreme Markup Languages® conference, every Markup Technologies conference, and quite a few of the predecessor XML and SGML conferences. His goal in these talks was to find a way to quickly summarize the significance of as many of the conference presentations as possible.

Before the conference started he (usually) had an idea of the framework for the talk. In years when the conference had multiple tracks, he was unable to hear all of the talks, so he delegated people to listen and take notes for him. After the conference became a single track, he listened carefully to all presentations and made notes on how this might fit into the wrap-up. The evening before the last day of the conference was devoted to assembling most of the presentation, and during the break before the last session, he fit the morning presentations in.

Somehow, he managed to make each speaker feel privileged to have been mentioned and to make each feel that their conference presentation had been important. He made the conference seem like a coherent flow that touched on a number of important and interesting topics, and made speakers and attendees all feel that we had been a part of an important event.

Here is a voice recording of the wrap-up Michael gave at Balisage 2024. He considered it one of his best. A transcript will be avaliable soon.

Transcripts of some of his previous conference wrap-ups are available at: