It’s been five years since I attended the Online News Association annual conference in Toronto. It was a great event, but I never made it back. So, I’m kinda’ excited to be heading to Boston next week for ONA 11.

Instead of my usual last-minute ad-hoc session selection, classically done during the first session of the conference, I thought I’d grab a cup of the good stuff and get ahead of the curve.

Here are my picks, minus the keynotes, lunches, and whatnot:

Thursday, September 22 (pre-conference day)

1. Obviously, I’m a bit partial to the super-awesome all-day Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 event, because I’m helping to organize it. Why don’t you come and build something too? :)

2. If I wasn’t helping with the hack day, I’d most certainly check out News Entrepreneuring 3.0 with Jan Schaffer, Scott Rosenberg, and many other news start-up celebs.

Friday, September 23 (the main show)

1. You Can’t Duck the Math: Entrepreneurial Journalism with folks from UMass Amherst and CUNY journalism programs.

2. New Platforms for Long-Form Journalism with Nieman Journalism Lab, The Atavist, and Longreads.

3. The Brand Is Dead; Long Live the Brand! with Meghan Garber and Matt Thompson.

4. Making It Work with a Small Staff with the folks from Technically Philly (who put on BarCamp News Innovation) and Oakland Local.

Saturday, September 24

1. Google News and Newsrooms with folks from, well, Google. Interested to get the inside scoop on getting inside Google News.

2. SMO Is the New SEO with folks from Yahoo! and Mashable. Kinda’ unsure about this one… might check out the unconference session instead.

3. Last but not least, you’ll find me at the Media, Freedom, and the Web: Lunch with the Knight Foundation and Mozilla lunch session with Jose Zamora and Dan Sinker (and you should be too!).

After lunch, I’ll need to run to the airport to catch a flight to Berlin for the first Knight-Mozilla “Hacktoberfest” — a week-long building and making sprint with twenty of the #MozNewsLab graduates, and representatives from each of our news partners, Al Jazeera English, BBC, Boston.com, Guardian UK, and Zeit Online.

If I were sticking around, I’d probably check out:

1. One Size Fits All: Responsive Web Design because I’m working on a responsive project for The Tyee right now.

2. ‘If I Were in Charge, I’d _’ because I’d love to hear more about what these folks would change.

I think you should be able to see my picks here. If you’re going to ONA 11 too, I’d be interested to see what sessions you’re excited to attend. Drop your link in the comments whydontcha’?

“Always be releasing.”

I’m going to be helping with some ‘Hack Days’ later this year for the Knight-Mozilla partnership. One in Berlin in September or October, and another with the Boston Hacks/Hackers chapter during the Online News Association conference.

I’d also like to organize some here in Toronto with our local Hacks/Hackers chapter, and support from the local start-up community, and the media organizations that come out to our event, i.e.: CBC, The Globe & Mail, Postmedia National Post, Global News, OpenFile.ca, and so on.

(Hey, while I’m thinking of it, the Toronto chapter of Hacks/Hackers is pushing toward 300 members — if you haven’t joined yet, why don’t you? It only takes a minute.)

I’ve attended more than a few hack days in my life (or hackathons, code jams, or whatever the kids are calling them now). Let me tell you, in case you don’t already know from experience, that building useful software in 1-2 days with people you don’t know is fucking hard.

That’s why I admire events that have the infrastructure figured out (and I’m not talking about pizza and Jolt cola). Specifically, I’m impressed when they’ve answered the question “how are we going to host these apps, show them off publicly, and make the code available for others to build on?”

It sounds like the recent Buttercamp in NYC did a great job, but they didn’t get 100% of the demos online at the end of the event, and that’s a missed opportunity.

That should be the target that teams strive for, and the eligibility criteria to ‘win’ at the event. Code and demos should be online and visible to the other teams and to the public. Always be releasing.

This must be a solved problem? I’m hoping that there’s a write-up somewhere out there that will be posted in the comments. But, if that’s not the case, here’s what I’m proposing:

• The event organizers do a fair bit of prep-work in advance to make the above possible. Specifically, by setting up an event-specific Github’organization’ that participants will be added to.

• There should be a straightforward LAMP-stack Amazon EC2 instance made available for each team, or a bare bones instance that they can set-up with their preferred stack.

• Each of the public URLs for the instances should be listed, so that teams and organizers can check on progress. Always be releasing. (One could even have fun with a leader board type set-up, e.g., a simple HTML page with a bunch of iframes — one for each teams instance — that reloads their app every minute or so. Same goes for a tally of Github commits by team.)

• With a bit more planning, organizers could even look into using something like DotCloud — or one of the PaaS providers — or a fancy set-up like this one for Node.js that auto-deploys to the EC2 instance with the ‘git push’ command.

For the finale at the hack day, each team should have to present their work live, via the EC2 instance URL. It should also be required that what’s running on the EC2 is a straightforward ‘git pull’ of the code in their Github repository.

Maybe that’s the suspense-building moment, where the teams — live, in front of an audience — have to run a ‘git pull’ and deploy their app, and then load it in a browser. Oh, the suspense!

That’s how I would add some exponential gnerativity to a hack day. Mark my words, it would work.

UPDATE: While I’m thinking of it, it would also be great if each team had a person willing to live blog, or status update, during the event, to expose the whole process — the challenges, the breakthroughs, and opportunities for others to check out their app.

UPDATE 2: Rather humorously, Amazon EC2 had an outage on the day I wrote this. I guess the lesson is: have a back-up plan prepared.

This just in from online strategy sage Jason Mogus of Communicopia:

Digital Innovation: New Tools for Engagement

Social Media is dramatically changing the way we build relationships, lead our organizations, and inspire social change. Coupled with new technologies is an increased demand from consumers and clients for accountability, access to information and transparent institutional conduct. This course will focus on how your organization can make the cultural shift required to capitalize on technology’s capacity for creating meaningful public participation and social change. You’ll leave this course with fresh perspectives and concrete ideas about how your organization can embrace technology to further your social mission.

You will learn:

• how to use emerging digital tools to engage the individuals or groups that influence your organization
• how digital tools can aid collaboration across your organization best practices from other organizations who have succeeded in using digital innovation to collaborate across silos, create authentic dialogue with the public, harvest new ideas, and better respond to a changing world
• how to overcome barriers in order to foster a culture of openness and collaboration in your organization with regard to digital innovation
• what human resource models are needed to support effective use of social media

Who should attend: This course is of interest to managers and leaders in the public and non profit sectors who want to better use social media to engage their constituents and further their social mission. Seating is limited to 40 participants.

Great opportunity for this in Vancouver to learn from an experienced leader in the field of social media and online campaigning.

The event is on March 5, 2010 and the cost to attend is $195. The registration site is here.