[Update: Lauren has posted her farewell message.]

On Thursday night in front a packed banquet hall in Atlanta, Lauren Wood announced her retirement as chair of the annual fall XML conference, the world’s largest XML event.

Lauren has done an outstanding job organizing and building up this conference over the past five years, but that’s only one of her many contributions to the XML community. Lauren also chaired the W3C DOM working group from its inception to the release of DOM level 2, and before that, she worked for SoftQuad, producers of one of the leading SGML and XML editors.

Lauren is now at Sun Microsystems and starting to spend some of her time on Liberty Alliance work — given Lauren’s track record so far, I’m suddenly a little more optimistic about the prospects of shared digital identity and single sign-on for the web.

Photo by Tim Bray, copyright (c) Lauren Wood, used under a Creative Commons license.