Web Directions

Get ready for the crowdsourced conference

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• March 25, 2008
• Leave a response

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!

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