Last year I wrote about my admiration for Posterous.

Since then I have been guilty of peripheral participation ... admiring from afar whilst engaged elsewhere.

I do need to develop my Posterous use and am reminded of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's observation:

Sorry for being away!

I have been away from my Posterous blog for a long time. I was prompted by Sachin's email news to return!

"On Wednesday and Friday, our servers were hit by massive Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. We responded quickly and got back online within an hour, but it didn’t matter; the site went down and our users couldn’t post.

On Friday night, our team worked around the clock to move to new data centers, better capable of handling the onslaught. It wasn’t easy. Throughout the weekend we were fixing issues, optimizing the site, some things going smoothly, others less so.

Just at the moments we thought the worst was behind us, we’d run up against another challenge. It tested not only our technical abilities, but our stamina, patience, and we lost more than a few hairs in the process.

I’m happy to report Posterous is at 100% and better than ever. Switching to a new data center will help us avoid the type of attacks we saw last week, and the new, bigger, beefier servers will speed up the site and increase capacity. We were hit pretty hard, but we’ve come out stronger in the end."

I liked Sachin's acknowledgement of the Posterous staff:

"At the same time, I have never been prouder of the Posterous team. Garry led the team in the server migration, Vince worked like a mad man until he passed out on his desk, and Jackson helped the community understand the impacts of some pretty technical issues. This week has been all hands on deck, and we had some pretty great hands."

In my naive way I wondered why anyone would want to disrupt Posterous. 

The October 2009 IACSS Newsletter is available here IACSS-Newsletter16.pdf

A copy of the program at IACSS09 Schedule 090916.pdf

There has been a very detailed response to the request for papers. At the time of collating this draft there were still some papers awaited.

This file contains all the papers in order of the first author's family name.

090922 IACSS09 Proceedings rfs.pdf

Please receive my very best wishes for full Symposium success.
I am sure Keith will manage it with exceptional skillfulness.
Best regard to all
Leo pavicic

The Program and Abstracts are now available online.

There should be links to three files at the bottom of the page. If you have any trouble downloading the files, try Refreshing the browser window as sometimes the caching seems to work strangely.

"It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed."

- Napoleon Hill

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Hill

In September we are going to have lots of people meet each other for the first time in a remarkable venue in Canberra, Australia. Some presenters will be at the start of their professional career whilst others are acknowledged world leaders in their field.

We will have lots of ways to communicate at the conference and the aim is to make IACSS09 a rich social learning experience. Recently Doug Johnson has been writing about conferences, workshops and panels.

In his discussion of conference presentations he notes that "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel". One of the important questions for the conference organisers to address is how to facilitate this experience. In part it will require careful attention to the environment within which exchange takes place and a sensitivity to presenters who will be sharing their ideas in a language that is not their first language.

These are links to Doug Johnson's posts about Workshops and Panel Discussions.

I think all three make for good reading for organisers of events such as IACSS09.