Web Directions

About

The peo­ple and thoughts behind Web Directions

Founded in Australia in 2004, by long time web indus­try fig­ures Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp, Web Directions con­fer­ences bring together the web industry’s lead­ing experts from around the world to edu­cate and inspire our attendees.

Our major con­fer­ences, Web Directions South (Sydney, Australia), Web Directions North, (North America), Web Directions East and now Web Directions @media in London cover the full range of inter­ests for web pro­fes­sion­als — web design, front-​​end and and back-​​end devel­op­ment, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, inter­ac­tion design, acces­si­bil­ity, data visu­al­iza­tion and much more. We have also pro­duced the ground­break­ing GovHack for the Australian Federal Government’s Government 2.0 task­force.

The Web Directions approach

Unlike many con­fer­ences, rather than call­ing for papers and speak­ers, we have a edi­to­r­ial approach — we put together pro­grams based on cur­rent trends in the indus­try, and seek out speak­ers who are work­ing in those areas to give inspir­ing, enter­tain­ing, but most impor­tantly prac­ti­cal pre­sen­ta­tions. Take a look at our blog and resources site to see slides and hear pod­casts from our pre­vi­ous events.

But as impor­tant as the con­tent is, con­fer­ences are also about con­nect­ing with your peers — mak­ing new con­nec­tions, and strength­en­ing exist­ing ones, shar­ing know-​​how and exper­tise, find­ing an expert, or new clients. At Web Directions events we pay care­ful atten­tion to this side of things with social events, and inno­v­a­tive use of social soft­ware to help build and strengthen those relationships.

With all our con­fer­ences and events our com­mit­ment is to

• bring together the best pos­si­ble speak­ers — knowl­edge­able, enter­tain­ing, inspir­ing real world experts
• cover the issues, tech­nolo­gies, con­cepts and tech­niques web pro­fes­sion­als need right now
• keep a clear sep­a­ra­tion between con­fer­ence con­tent and com­mer­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion — we have a clear no “pay to speak” policy
• pro­vide the best pos­si­ble value for our atten­dees — we try to deliver as much as pos­si­ble, for as lit­tle as possible.
• help atten­dees con­nect with their peers through social events, and our own online net­works like tweeps

In short — we put together the events we’d want to attend, and we trust you’ll want to as well.

Maxine Sherrin

A shy per­son who avoids the stage as vam­pires avoid day­light Maxine is the per­son who dots the i’s and crosses the t’s and makes all those hard deci­sions like whether to have white choco­late chip cook­ies or muffins for morn­ing tea at any Web Directions Event. She’s also the one who takes care of get­ting the word out about upcom­ing conferences.

In a pre­vi­ous life Maxine used to develop and main­tain the large col­lec­tion of web devel­op­ment resources and courses at Westciv, but the day is rapidly approach­ing where she will have for­got­ten the dif­fer­ence between a child and a first child selector.

In her spare time Maxine enjoys play­ing ten­nis, gar­den­ing, and watch­ing old John Waters movies.

John Allsopp

John is a co-​​founder of the Web Directions con­fer­ence series, and author of one of the ear­li­est books on Microformats. As a soft­ware devel­oper, long stand­ing web devel­op­ment speaker, writer, evan­ge­list and self pro­claimed expert, he’s spent the last 15 years work­ing with and devel­op­ing for the web.

As the head devel­oper of the lead­ing cross plat­form CSS devel­op­ment tool Style Master, and devel­oper and pub­lisher of renowned train­ing courses and learn­ing resources on CSS and stan­dards based devel­op­ment, and author of the highly regarded “Dao of Web Design” he has been widely rec­og­nized as a leader in these fields.

He’s mar­ried to Sara, and has two beau­ti­ful daugh­ters, Zoe and Scarlett.