Velo-city Global 2012 Vancouver has finally issued its call for presentations, and you'd better not take much time to think about it: the deadline is Nov. 15.
Velo-city Global 2012, to be held June 26-29 in Vancouver, will be the world's largest bicycle advocacy conference. The child of the European Cycling Federation, the 2012 event is one of the few to be scheduled outside of Europe. It will attract cycling advocates, planners, bicycle innovators and infrastructure suppliers from around the world.
Products are secondary to ideas. This is a clearinghouse for thinking, processes, imagination, experience. The call for presentations is the invitation for planners, researchers, developers, advocates and others to be part of the roundtables, workshops, research presentations and symposia that will be running concurrently through the four days. You can read about the various formats for presentation here. Of particular interest will be the PechaKucha events, sort of speed-dating for idea-sharing, where presenters of similar themes will be given 20 minutes and 20 slides to make their point and host a discussion.
For someone like me, this is a cycle advocacy candy store. In the course of my time at Velo-city Global 2010 Copenhagen, I acquired a bicycle buzz that buzzes still.
The call for presentations was to have been posted in September, but the Velo-city team has apparently been on the move and it wasn't updated until just recently. I got an email notice letting me know about it on Tuesday. I was told last month that the online registration would be open in November, and the website says that registration will open in November, but it hasn't opened yet.
Soon, grasshopper, soon.