Events & meetups

We did it! Our second year and our second conference went off without a hitch!

You have just a few days to get your tickets for the WE Believe in Community conference. Registrations close Friday, 7 August 2009. Conference highlights include:

Sat in the car heading down to Canberra for the second Public Sphere, Reem, Bern (from Mosman Council), and I have been talking about the possibilities of local government on the web, and the challenges that face the web staff in councils. In New South Wales we're on varying levels when it comes to our websites, or web services. Many are still tackling the basics of getting a functioning, usable, accessible website up, whilst others are experimenting in the realms of social media.

Recently, Kate Lundy, Senator for the ACT, launched a new initiative called “Public Sphere” to engage with the community on topics of national interest. The concept aims to bring people together online to share their views on various topics, in addition to hosting a physical meet up that is live streamed over the Internet. The meet up allows people to give their two cents in short ten minute presentations on whatever aspect of the topic they choose, either in person, via skype, YouTube or other means.

Okay so excuse the blog title, but right now I'm all full of excitement due to the fantastic news that Webjam is back! If you've been to one before then you'll understand my excitement. If not then here's why you should go:

Web Directions is running a number of workshops around the Web Directions South conference in September. Once of the workshops you may be interested for yourself and/or your colleagues and managers is the Web 2.0 Executive Bootcamp. This is not a day about technology or code, but rather a deep exploration of the latest ideas, best practices, and techniques behind Web 2.0.

If you are in Sydney around 19th August make sure you go to the Web Standards Group meeting on Tuesday night. There's a great list of presenters including Tim Lucas who is also presenting at our conference at the end of that week. WSG provides a great way to meet other web professionals, there's forums and mailing lists that you can join so even if you can't make the meetups you can participate in discussion.

Register now so you don't miss out!

We Believe In Community: 21 - 22 August 2008

2 full days on web technologies, strategies, creativity, and standards. 12 sessions in 2 streams and 6 plenary sessions from some of the leading experts in the field from Industry and Government.

The McFarlane Prize recognizes excellence in Australian web design and development in the broadest sense, and is decided by a jury of experts in design, coding, accessibility and usability. The prize, which was started in 2006 in memory of Australian web and open source pioneer Nigel McFarlane is open to any Australian web developers or development teams, for a site completed between August 1st 2007 and August 31st this year.

We've managed to gather an awesome list of speakers for our first conference. Check out the session descriptions and bios on the speakers page now. Okay sorry there's a few gaps, we're finalising a few details still but we're nearly there. Organising the program was a bit like trying to solve a Rubik's cube, but it's looking pretty good now. If you want to know what sessions will be on which day have a look at the draft program (this could be changed before the conference but we'll try and keep it as close to this as possible, we promise!).