CommCon planning has stepped up a notch in the past couple of weeks. We opened our Call for Papers back in October 2017 and it closed just before Christmas. We received 73 submissions from across the VoIP and WebRTC industries; I couldn’t have been happier personally.
Some of the best minds in VoIP and WebRTC will be converging at a country house in Surrey in the UK; sharing their knowledge in what will be the first event of its kind in this industry. Pay one price and have everything taken care of for you; all you have to do is get to the venue and we’ll take care of pretty much everything else.
Just over a week ago the speaker lineup was announced and its something I’m pretty damn proud of; so much so that I want to highlight some of the amazing speakers to you now. You won’t find a project talked about more than once at CommCon — we have a highly varied lineup to give you a true indication of what’s happening in the industry.
VoIP Track
On the VoIP track we have all four of the main projects coming along. We have talks from Matt Fredrickson from the Asterisk project, Michael Jerris from the FreeSWITCH project as well as Daniel-Constantin Mierla from the Kamailio project and Răzvan Crainea from the OpenSIPS project.
If those weren’t enough, we’ve got a talk by Evan McGee — he’ll be talking about Realtime Machine Learning. Evan’s talks are always a treat to watch and I’m sure this one will be no different; if you’re coming along and you’ve never seen him talk before, I recommend it. The real question is whether the bowtie makes an appearance or not; seems a shame not to considering the surroundings we’ll be in.
WebRTC Track
The WebRTC track is full of choice as well. We’ve got almost every SFU project coming: Jitsi Videobridge, MediaSoup (a new Node.js based SFU), Medooze Media server (another new Node.js based SFU) and Janus WebRTC Gateway. On top of all that, we have an update on the WebRTC project from Google and I’m also really looking forward to hearing about how Slack utilise WebRTC in their Web, Desktop and Mobile apps.
Spanning Tracks
There are only 3 talks spanning both tracks at once at CommCon. Although they’re on 3 separate days, they’re not really Keynotes as such — they’re all scheduled after lunch each day, and they’re shared between tracks because they’re useful to VoIP developers and WebRTC developers alike. One of them is from Dave Horton on something called Drachtio; a project that lets you handle SIP messages using Node.js. Its a project I use a lot at Nimble Ape and more people should know about how amazing it is.
Speaker Diversity
On the day the UK celebrates 100 years since Women got the right to a vote, it makes me remember how far we have still to go in the tech industry. At CommCon we’ve got five women speaking across the two tracks. They’re not there to make up the “diversity” numbers, they’re there because they are experts in their field and deserve to be heard. I can’t wait for the day where a speaker’s gender is something we don’t talk about. I wonder how things will be in another 100 years? Hopefully, they’ll look back and wonder why we even had to talk about it.
I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at Wotton House in June! If you haven’t already, you can go and book your ticket at https://ti.to/nimbleape/commcon2018
