Thing 15 - Attending, presenting and organizing seminars and conferences

I have never attended a big 'annual conference'. When I was at the stage in my career that I might have accompanied e.g. a manager/experienced colleague to see how conferences 'work', I didn't really have a manager who was involved enough with cataloguing to take this on. The cost for big events can also be prohibitive (plus I always seem to be on my holidays when the annual CIG conference is held!). However... I would still like to attend one, though it may have to be self-funded - I had better start saving.
All that said, I do attend a fair number of one-day events; this year I have gone to various Cilip seminars - the executive briefing on RDA, a reclassification day, and my next one is coming in December on shelf-ready books. These can be invaluable - not just in terms of practical applications for work, but also for networking with those in similar posts, and increasing confidence in keeping up to date with current issues. Online events can also be good - for example, the Cilip reclassification day was followed by a 2 day CIG eForum on reclassification within the same month, which was great to take part in.
I have never presented formally either. I have at a university staff conference taken part in a poster as part of our I.R. advocacy (which was a good way to introduce the service to academic staff) but that was mostly demonstration and conversation. I have also done internal presentations and training. So I read and appreciated the tips on presenting via the CPD23 website (particularly Bethan's information professional blog's reassurance that you can script a presentation!), but I'm not sure when I will have the opportunity to put the tips into practice.
As far as organizing an event like this, I assume that one would have to join a committee somewhere to get involved in this? But perhaps I should think of a local cataloguing librarian's event to get started. I haven't met my equivalents from libraries within my geographical area. Maybe now would be a good time to - or at least to contact my local Cilip group to make sure that it's not happening already.