Last week I attended the Localization Research Centre's 14th annual conference in Limerick, Ireland. My role there was to present a poster session. This is a new format for me so I thought I'd take a moment to explain it. The idea is that you create a poster (A0 size in this case) about your chosen subject and the organisers print this out and hang it in an area with many other posters. At a given time (lunch time in this case) you stand next to your poster and answer questions about it to anyone who takes an interest. Here's a composite of 3 photos before anyone started (the composite was created by Microsoft's Image Composite Editor):-

Here is my "Internationalizing Silverlight" poster (complete with pasting error) together with another very interesting poster on English To Chinese Translation):-

I found it a really interesting idea and I think it would work at events in our industry. In some ways it is like the sadly unsuccessful Ask The Experts that was tried a few times at DDD in Reading. In the Ask The Experts format lots of experts hang around waiting for people to come up and ask them any question at all. It seemed like a good idea but it never worked which was a shame and at the time we couldn't see how to fix it. The poster sessions appear to solve the Ask The Experts problem by having a physical focus, a clear subject matter area and a ready made set of discussion points. We might try this out at DDD South West 2.