One would think that almost five years after the definition of HTML5 offline capabilities this question would be answered. As someone spending a lot of time on HTML5 panels and Q&A sessions at conferences I can tell you though that it gets asked every single time.

As part of the App Basics for Firefox OS video series we recorded a very short video that shows that HTML5 apps totally can work offline:

You can see the demo explained in the video in action here: non-offline version and offline enabled version.

So here it is: No, HTML5 apps don’t have to be online all the time, they do work offline if you write them the right way.

“But, but, but, but, but…”, I already here people go, “it is not that simple, as there are lots of issues with offline functionality”.

Yes, there are. Appcache is a less than perfect solution, as researched in-depth by Jake Archibald and published in non-minced words almost 2 years ago. There are also issues with localStorage being string based and synchronous and thus being less than optimal for large datasets. For larger datasets the issue is that indexedDB is not supported by all browsers, which is why you need to duplicate your efforts using WebSQL or use an abstraction library instead.

But: these are not insurmountable issues. I am very happy to see offline first becoming a UX starting point, I am super excited about discussions about replacing AppCache and the ServiceWorker proposal showing a much more granular approach to the issue.

For an in-depth showcase how offline can really work, check out Andrew Bett’s 2012 Full Frontal talk.

The problem is that these are details that don’t interest the business person considering using HTML5. All they hear is experts complaining and bickering and saying that offline HTML5 doesn’t work. Which isn’t true. It doesn’t work perfectly, but nothing on the web ever does. Many, many things in Android and iOS are broken, and many apps don’t work offline either. These shortcomings are not advertised though which makes native apps appear as a much more reliable alternative. We should stop showing our behind the scenes footage as a highlight reel.

I really, really want this question to not show up any longer. The documentation and proof is out there. Let’s tell people about that. Please?

I just got back from Edgeconf 3 in London, England, and I am blown away by how good the event was. If you are looking for a web conference that is incredible value for money, look no further.

The main difference of Edgeconf is its format. Whilst you had a stellar line-up of experts, the conference is not a series of talks or even several tracks in parallel. Instead, it is a series of panels with curated Q&A in the style of Question Time on BBC. Questions are submitted by the audience before the conference using Google Moderator and expert moderator triage and collate the questions. Members from the audience read out the questions to the panel and the moderator then picks experts to answer them. Audience members also can show their intent to ask a question or offer extra information.

In essence: the whole conference is about getting questions answered, not about presenting. This means that there is a massive amount of information available in a very short amount of time and there is no chance to grand-stand or advocate solutions without proof.

The main workload of the conference is covered by the moderators. It is up to them to not only triage the questions but also keep the discussion lively and keep it entertaining.

All the moderators met the day before the event and spent half a day going through all the submitted questions and whittle them down to seven per panel. Each person answering a question has 30 seconds to a minute to answer and there is strict time-keeping.

The whole event was streamed live on YouTube and the recordings are available on Youtube/Google+.

During the panels, the audience can interact live using the Onslyde system. You can agree or disagree with a topic and request to speak or ask a question. All this information is logged and can be played in sync with the video recording later on. Onslyde also creates analytics reports showing sentiment analysis and more. Other conferences like HTML5DevConf, Velocity and OsCon also started using this system.

Another big thing about Edgeconf is that any of the extra income from tickets and sponsorship (in this case around £10,000) get donated to a good cause. At the end of the conference the organisers showed a full disclosure of expenditure. The cause this time was Codeclub, a charity teaching kids coding.

I am very proud to have been one of the moderators this time and run the accessibility panel (a detailed post on this comes later).

I have to thank the organisers and everyone involved for a great event. I learned a lot during the day and I am happy to be involved again in September.

I am excited as a puppy with three tails about the opportunity to speak at TEDx Thessaloniki later this year. It is very different from talks at IT conferences and has been a dream of mine for a while. Today the organisers asked me to answer three questions to get some more insight into what I think (there be dragons, believe me). Here’s what I answered:

1. What is the biggest change you’ve experienced in your life, in personal level, until today?

I was very lucky to have had the courage to make a clean cut when I had the chance. Leaving my home town and the country I was born in for a job is something most people dream of and a lot of others are too scared to do. By un-rooting myself and going to work in a country where I don’t speak the language natively I got a jump-start for my career.

This clear cut also gave me the courage to approach my work differently. For example, I am 100% sure that my career is based on the fact that I gave out everything I do for free and for other people to build upon. People called me crazy and my parents to date still wonder how I make money without charging people for everything I do. I love it, because it means my work gets used which gives me more satisfaction than a one-off payment would do. It also means that my thoughts and ideas live on even when I move to other goals or get hit by a truck or eaten by a tiger. I freed my ideas and thoughts and this inspires other people.

Liberating yourself from traditions and pressures of your background gives you an amazing sense of freedom and liberty to become more than you are.

2. What’s the biggest goal you have set until today? Is it accomplished? Do you still fight for it or you quit it, and why?

I think I once saw an interview with Stephen King where the interviewer asked him how much money he has and he answered he has no idea. He just wants to carry as much around as he needs to buy some new clothes or a sandwich. Whilst I am not a big fan of his work, this excited me. My goal is to feel happy with what I do and to share that excitement. I am doing really well in that, but there are still so many rigid ideas to fight. I want people to do what they love to do and make a living with it. We don’t celebrate these enough. Instead our media portraits the richest people as the most successful, despite the fact that not many of them are happy being in the rat-race.
I started as a radio journalist and quit my job when I discovered the internet. I loved the idea of a free medium open to anyone to publish and be heard and I spent years and years to show people that it can be done. Nowadays I worry a lot about this dream. The internet is on the decline – people are OK with governments censoring it and are fine with being told what hardware to use and that some materials are not available to them because they are in the wrong country. This is not the medium of the future. I will not give in to marketing telling me that this is evolution – I think we’re going backwards.

3. From what we have experienced the recent years, as a global society, what event would you describe as the biggest end or beginning for humanity?

Wikileaks. Hands down. It was a wonderful information bomb that exploded and unearthed not only lots of information that needed to be heard but also a wake up call for people. Are whistleblowers heroes when the information they leak is important to us? What if the same people leaked information about our security to outside enemies? Who are the enemies? Do they really exists or are we being told what to fear so we don’t ask too many questions?

Much good can come out of this, many important discussions to be had. Events like this can bring out the best in humanity which means to me the beginning of something great. It also shows me how many people are not even interested in questioning their governments as long as there is a new TV show to follow, which is a sign of the end of humanity. It polarises and that means we can now pick a camp. If anything, there is movement and a mass can only be a force when it is moved.

Following Remy Sharp’s excellent You’re paying to speak post about conferences not paying speakers I thought it might be interesting to share some of my experiences.

I’ve been on the road now for almost three years constantly presenting at conferences, running workshops, giving brownbags and the like. I am also part of the group in Mozilla that sifts through all the event requests we get (around 30-40 a month right now).

A labour of love

I love speaking. I love the rush of writing a talk, organising my thoughts and trying to distill the few points I want the audience to take away to impress their peers with. I do it out of passion, not because I get paid. If I were to do it to get paid, I’d quit my job and ask for payment for my talks and run much more workshops. This is where real money comes in for speakers. As it is now, all I ask for is to be put up in a hotel, and – if possible – get my flights or travel expenses paid.

Drowning in mediocrity

That’s why I get annoyed when conference organisers see speakers as a commodity. In the last year I had a few incidences that made me wonder why I bother putting effort into my work instead of writing one or two talks a year and keep repeating them (which works, I see people do it):

• I had a few events where the organisers flat out didn’t want to put me up in a hotel.
• I had events where the organisers got me a flight and a hotel – just not at the same dates, so I had to get a last minute room for myself without being reimbursed
• I had a few events where I arrived in time for my talk just to see that the speaker before me was still speaking and my talk time was half of what I planned for.
• I had an event where the room planning was all askew and people couldn’t find my talk which meant I presented for 10 people who were lucky enough to already having been in the room (2 of which trying to find another talk)
• I even had an event where I had perfectly set up my computer (including already running screen recording) only to have a “sponsored pitch” speaker disconnect my laptop and give a five minute intro I wasn’t told about before my keynote.

And here comes the kicker: every single one of these bad examples happened in the United States – most in San Francisco. The place where everybody dreams of speaking, the place where all the cool kids are and where apparently everything happens that rocks our web world.

The happy incidences

On the flipside of this, almost every conference in Europe and Asia I’ve been to was an amazing experience. Organisers know you are what makes a conference and they make you feel welcome. A few outstanding ones:

• When I lost my credit card in Romania, the organisers of the Internet and Mobile World Romania came by the hotel, organised with the local restaurant that I could eat for free, got me some money to spend and took me out for an amazing evening to get my mind off the dilemma. That on top of a flawless pickup from the airport, great hotel to stay in and transport to and from the venue.
• The Login conference in Lithuania had dedicated helpers for each speaker to help you get around and pick you up at the airport. Instead of chancing us using the expensive room service in the hotel or organise one huge dinner, they cut deals with all the restaurants around the hotel to have ledgers for speakers to eat whatever we wanted paid by the organisers afterwards
• Marc Thiele’s Beyond Tellerand conference in Germany is all about a cozy atmosphere encouraging speakers and attendees to mingle. He even had music artists sample the talks into songs live at the event.
• The Smashing Conf had flawless travel organisation and a super nice welcome basket in the hotel room for speakers with tourism info how to get around town for partners the speakers might have brought

Keep the talent happy

I am not saying I expect all of these things, I am saying that organisers outside the US seem to understand one thing others have forgotten and Remy mentioned as well: without good speakers putting effort in, there is no conference.

Remy had an excellent point, namely that having speakers and taking care of them should be part of the budget of every conference:

That’s what a budget is for – which comes from ticket sales and sponsorship agreements. It is part of their budget because without a speaker, they have no content to sell.

Good talks make a conference

Of course there is more to a conference than just the presentations: there are booths, there is networking during breaks and at the afterparties. But you don’t need a conference for that – you could just attend a meetup. A conference is about good presentations and workshops. And this is where I get very angry when I see corners being cut when it comes to speakers.

Yes, running a conference is expensive. And running one in San Francisco even more so. But why add cuts at the core content? Maybe spend less on the afterparty in a loud club with lots of drinks leading to socially inept people behaving like cavemen and creating the next “conference incident”. Maybe don’t move into the bigger location and instead allow your event to retain its soul? Conferences like dconstruct, Full Frontal and Edge Conf show that this works.

As people who buy tickets, you deserve to get a good show. You deserve to be challenged, to learn something new. Of course, most of you do not pay for the tickets – your companies do – but that doesn’t make a difference. If organisers don’t value their speakers and instead pad their events with lots of tracks with just slightly veiled sales pitches you shouldn’t make jokes about this and have a coffee instead – you should ask for your money back.

Nicholas Zakas also covered this in The Problem with Tech Conference talks lately.

Too many conferences

The hype we experience in our market also leads to a massive overload of events. Not all are needed – by a long shot. Some have been around so long they’ve become a spoof of themselves. It is time to ask for better quality.

In the US, this is a tradition thing: tech conferences have been around for ages and there are a lot of terrible “this is how it always worked” shortcuts being taken. IT conferences have become cookie-cutter. Not only do you see the same booths, the same catering and the same companies, you also see the same kind of talks over and over again.

As a company owner, I’d frankly not set up a budget for conference attendance any longer. It is not part of training when you don’t learn something new or get in-depth insight into something you already should know. And there is really no shortage of online content or even meetups where you can get the same information. The job of a speaker is to bring this content to life, to explain the why instead of the how or bring a new angle to the subject matter. This doesn’t happen if conference talks are limited to local speakers who are in the same echo chamber.

Show us the money so you can talk?

Which brings me to sponsoring. Mozilla’s and my policy is that we don’t sponsor events to get speaking slots. We want Mozillians to attend an event and have one speaker even before we consider sponsorship. Giving talks and giving money to the event are disconnected. I wished every company did that. There is far too much “pay to play” going on and that leads to boring sales pitches that are lucrative for organisers and insulting to the audience and, frankly, painful to watch.

Having insight into the numbers around events is another thing that keeps amazing me. I can not tell them here, but let’s say sponsoring a coffee break in a San Francisco conference for 200 people easily pays for sponsoring a whole venue in Poland, India or Romania – including the posters and branding.

So here’s my view: when I speak at your conference, I already sponsor it. I attach my name to it, I dedicate time to make it worth while for your audience to listen to me and you can add your branding to the video of my talk. I will not pay to “get a better speaking slot” and I will not sponsor to “get another talk for Mozilla” in.

I am happy to be at an event that values what I do. I will stop going to those that feel like I am just a name to attract people without really being challenged to give a good talk. As a speaker, I am a sponsor. Not with money, but with my reputation and my time and effort. That should get rewarded, much like any other sponsorship gets placement and mentioning.

Comment on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter if you are so inclined.

As part of the workweek I am currently at I set a goal to give a brownbag on “writing for speaking”. The reasons is that some of the training materials for the Mobile World Congress I recorded were great marketing/press materials but quite a pain to speak into a camera reading them from a teleprompter.

For the record: the original text is a good press release or marketing article. It is succinct, it is full of great soundbites and it brings the message across. It is just not easy to deliver. To show the issues and explain what that kind of wording can come across as I took the script apart. I explained paragraph by paragraph what the problems are and proposed a replacement that is more developer communication friendly. You can see the result on GitHub:

http://codepo8.github.io/marketing-translation/

The result is an easier to deliver text with less confusion. Here’s a recording of it to compare.

I will follow this up with some more materials on simpler communication for speaking soon.