O’Reilly Media, which has been producing the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in February in New York for a number of years, will be presenting a mini Tools of Change in Vancouver on Oct. 20, 2012 (with a set of pre-conference workshops on Oct. 19).  Here’s more about the event from the Centre for Digital Media events webpage on the Great Northern Way Campus website,

O’Reilly Media has teamed with SFU [Simon Fraser University] and the Centre for Digital Media to bring the first Mini-TOC to Canada!

The well-rounded program features speakers from the Vancouver area as well as speakers who have frequented our TOC in New York program.

100 lucky participants (50 in each workshop) will get to choose between our “Tech Workshop” and our “Secrets to Ebook Success” day-long workshops [on Oct. 19, 2012]. The Tech workshop will include sessions on HTML5, and OpenSource tools for mobile publishing. The Secrets to Ebook Success will feature a 1/2 day ebook publishing primer (including best practices for ebooks), and a 1/2 day on Social Media, online marketing, and promotional strategies for ebooks and book apps.

Mini TOC Vancouver will be topped off by the first ever TOC Vancouver Ignite [emphasis mine] spotlighting 10 brave local souls willing to share their innovative, world-altering (or potentially world-altering) bookish/techy/artsy stories in a breath-takingly brisk format!

At Mini TOC, the presentations are just the jumping off point for discussions that involve everyone in attendance. We mix up the format so there will be some “thinky” idea-oriented sessions where presenters will lead discussions post-preso — and some “do-y” technical Q+As, where attendees can ask the experts on things like digital conversion, layout, and UX. It’s BookCamp [a local epublishing biannual event produced by Simon Fraser University’s Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing], meets unconference, meets TOC.

Taking place at the brand new Centre for Digital Media.

For anyone not familiar with an Ignite talk (from the Wikipedia essay; Note: I have removed links and formatting),

Ignite is a global event, organized by volunteers, where participants are given five minutes to speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions, accompanied by 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds, and slides are automatically advanced. The Ignite format is similar to Pecha Kucha, which features 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. The presentations are meant to “ignite” the audience on a subject, i.e. to generate awareness and to stimulate thought and action on the subjects presented.

The first Ignite was held in 2006 in Seattle, Washington, and was the brainchild of Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. It was sponsored by O’Reilly Media and Make magazine. Since its inception, more than 50 Ignites have been started in cities around the world. O’Reilly has continued to support Ignite …

Getting back to the mini TOC, I believe ‘early bird pricing’ is available until tomorrow (Oct. 12, 2012), so you may want to sign up sooner rather than later. Here’s the Oct. 20, 2012 programme (from the Registration page of the O’Reilly mini Tools of Change web space),

9:00 – 10:00am            Check-in and Coffee

9:30 – 09:40am            Welcome and Announcements (Suzanne Norman, Kat Meyer)

9:40 – 10:10am            Opening Keynote: Corey Pressman (Exprima Media), “From Caves to Clouds: The Journey to Contentopia”

10:10 – 10:55am          Designing for Multiple Screens (Igor Faletski)

10:55 – 11:40am          Disrupting Academic Publishing One Mobile App At A Time: the OJS mobile app (Richard Smith and Brandon Yuh)

11:40am – 12:25pm     Digital Meets Traditional (Ryan Nadel)

12:25 – 12:30pm          Qbend (John Costa)

12:30 – 1:25pm            Lunch

1:25 – 1:55pm  Lean Publishing (Peter Armstrong)

1:55 – 2:25pm  Discovery in the App Marketplace (Brenda J. Walker)

2:25 – 2:55pm  Publishing, the Continuing Evolution: New Opportunities in Getting Stories Created and Out to Audiences (Robin Goldberg)

2:55 – 3:40pm  “To e-, or Not to e-“: Book Designers Discuss the Pros, Cons, and In-betweens of eBooks (Peter Cocking, Roberto Dosil, and Talent Pun)

3:40 – 3:55pm  Break

3:55 – 4:25pm  Rights of Creation: Legal Conundrums & Ethical Paradoxes (Jon Festinger)

4:25 – 5:00pm  Closing Keynote – Peter Meyers (Citia), “The Downside of Digital Devices”

5:00 – 5:30       Reception

5:30 – 6:00       IGNITE

Here’s the address:

Centre for Digital Media
685 Great Northern Way
Vancouver, BC