Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

John and I have been thinking about ways of drawing on the great ideas for speakers and topics from the people who come to the conference ever since the closing keynote of Web Directions South 2007. Who better to tell you about what content should be there than the people who are going to experience it right?

We really wanted to keep it simple and use ready rolled tools as much as possible, so the addition a while back of forms linked in to Google Spreadsheets caught my eye.

OK, it’s not the prettiest thing on the planet, and there’s very little customisation available, so you can’t brand it at all. And some of the UX is just plain bad, but, having said all that it looked like the best thing out there to provide a quick and easy solution to a simple problem.

So: anyone on my mailing list can expect an email tomorrow asking just a few quick questions with a view to finding out who and what you want to hear at Web Directions in Sydney in 2008. And yes, I want you to put up your hand if you think you’ve been working on something interesting this year and you’d like to speak about it – no more shrinking Australian violets please!

But that won’t be the end of it, and this is where the true beauty of using Google Docs for this will kick in. Once as many answers as possible are in – I’ll leave it open for two weeks – I’m going to make the survey available for everyone to see and open it up for a 6 hour discussion on April 11 between 9am and 3pm AEST. Watch this space and be there or be square!