In another life, I am one of the organizers of the Web Directions conferences, where we freqently feature microformats sessions (in Vancouver in February Web Directions North featured 3 hours of microformats focussed sessions - you can find podcasts and slides of those at the site).
We’ve just launched our latest conference, Web Directions South 2007, to be held in Sydney Australia at the end of September. While there is no one “microformats” session, I know the subject will get a lot of coverage in other sessions.
We get attendees from all over the world, so if you’ve ever been keen to come to Australia, this might be the perfect opportunity. And late September is a great time to visit Sydney - it’s when the Olympics were held to ensure the best possible weather. And if you are thinking it’s too far and too expensive - from the West Coast of the US, it’s as close as Europe, and the pricing is typically a lot less than most conferences of it’s kind, so take the saving off the price of an airfare, and it’s probably not a lot more expensive to come than to go to a conference in another U.S. city if you are from the U.S.
For you Web Conference junkies out there, here is the low down.
With more than 30 leading experts, including a dozen international stars of the web industry, across three tracks, Web Directions South will focus on the key technology and business issues of the web in 2007. It really is Australia’s premier event for the web industry.
Speakers for 2007 include
- Andy Clarke - Transcendent CSS
- Aaron Gustafson - Javascript and Ajax
- Brian Fling - designing for the mobile web
- George Oates - user experience design for communities
- Bert Bos - co-creator of CSS on the future of Web Standards
- Rashmi Sinha - online communities
- Adrian Holovaty - making data smart
- Mark Pesce - commons based peer production
plus many more new and old faces to educate and inspire us all once again this September. We’ve even got a couple of surpise speakers up our sleeves as well.
This year at Web Directions South alongside our traditional Design and Development focus, there’s a new Management/Strategy track. So, if you design or develop for the web, manage web teams, or if your business relies on the web, we’ve got two full days full for you.
And that’s just the conference. We’ve also got 6 workshops over the two days before Web Directions South:
- Brian Fling - Designing for the mobile web
- Aaron Gustafson - Progressive enhancement with Javascript
- Andy Clarke - Transcending CSS
- Laurel Papworth - Building vibrant and successful online communities
- Startup and freelance bootcamp. Every thing you need to know about going out on your own as a freelancer or startup company.
- World Wide Web Consortium SIG technology day - W3C experts covering the latest developments in web standards
Be sure to register before June 30 to take advantage of our excellent value early bird price of just $795. And if been to one of our previous conferences check your email on Monday for an additional discount by way of thanks for all your support over the years. If you don’t receive this email, please let us know.
This year, in yet another first, we’ll be featuring the Web Expo - running thoughout the conference at Darling Harbour.
And perhaps most exciting of all, we’ll be hosting Australia’s first Web Hack day, on the Saturday following the conference.
And of course there’ll be all the usual parties and opportunities to catch up with old friends, and make new connections.
We are really excited with the quality and range of speakers we’ve been able to get all the way to Sydney, the great new venue at Darling Harbour, with the new Expo, the extended range of workshops, and WebHack, and hope you’ll be too. We look forward to seeing you in Sydney at the end of September for what promises to be one of the stand out web events anywhere in the World - Web Directions South 2007.
{ 3 } Comments
John - WD07 Sydney September. Second paragraph above has “February”.
We will try to be there. The line up of speakers looks great.
John, I follow a lot of these conferences via the blogosphere. It seems like most of them have essentially the same program and even some speakers recycling old talks. What are you going to do to set your conference apart from all the rest?
Plus… is there going to be a Web accessibility component to the conference? It’d be great to have someone there to talk about WCAG 2.0 and WAI ARIA.
Justin,
we do quite a few things to keep our conferences as original and frsh as possible. We’ve got a long post on the conference blog about how we choose our program, so I won’t go into that in too much detail here. How do you think our program stacks up, btw?
As to accessibility, that’s always been a strong focus for us. This year we’ll have at least two sessions explicitly focussing on accessibility (one announced, the other being finalized). Our conference is very practically oriented, so sessions devoted to say WCAG2, as opposed to those which reference accessibility guidelines in the context of how to achieve aaccessibility in real world projects tend to work much better.
That being said, the W3C Australia Office’s SIG day is being held in conjunction with our conference, anfd there’s a session focussing on the W3Cs latest accessibility by Sofia Celic, a member of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.
Thanks, and hope this helps
john
Post a Comment