Two new one day Web Directions Conferences in May - Melbourne and Canberra
Along with our brand new site, we are even more excited to announce two brand new, one day conferences for Canberra and Melbourne in May - in addition of course to Web Directions South, set down for September 23-25 in Sydney again at the Convention Centre.
First up, on Friday May 16th, in Melbourne will be Web Directions UX, a one day, two track user experience focussed conference, featuring renowned web design and usability expert, and influential author and blogger Andy Budd, along with Robert Hoekman Jr, an interaction designer for companies like Adobe, Automattic, United Airlines, DoTheRightThing.com, Go Daddy Software, and many more, as well as author of the influential Designing the Obvious, and upcoming Designing the Moment along with local usability experts including Remember The Milk’s Emily Boyd, Mat Patterson from Campaign Monitor, and Dr Jackie Moyes from News Digital Media.
The conference is preceded on Thursday May 15th by a day of workshops, including a full day workshop on “guerilla” user testing techniques from Andy Budd, and a full day designing with Ajax workshop with young Aussie superstar Cameron Adams.
Then we move to Canberra, where on Monday May 19th, we’ll be presenting Web Directions Government, a one day, two track conference focussing on the concepts, technologies and techniques for meeting the challenges of eGovernment. With an opening keynote by the head of the W3C’s eGovernment initiative, José Manuel Alonso, the day also features a keynote by Robert Hoekman Jr, as well as local experts from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the ABC, AGIMO, and private industry, addressing the key technical and policy issues in web and eGovernment. Whatever your role with government and the web - be it management, policy or technical, there’ll be great, relevant content for you.
The Canberra conference is followed on the 20th by two one day workshops - with Cameron Adams again presenting his fantastic Ajax workshop, and Sebastian Chan presenting a day long workshop on Social Media and Government
We hope you’ll get excited about such wonderful speakers coming to your town, or think about making the trip to either of these great cities for the events. We know we really are excited to be putting these shows on, and can’t wait for May!
john and maxine
Adrian
March 16th, 2008 at 1:32 am
The Melbourne and Canberra 1 days are great, but why not move the Web Directions South conference around a bit instead of ALWAYS having it in Sydney
john
March 16th, 2008 at 2:00 am
Hi Adrian,
there’s a number of factors to that.
Above all, we are sydney folks, and knowing your domain really helps putting on an event like this. We need to frequently meet with the venue and related services, and tat typically goes best face to face. We also need to make this kind of decision 12 months or more in advance - our large non refundable deposit was paid for 2008 before Web Directions 2007 was even held! Then there’s the fact that for us, Sydney is a known quantity - we can be reasonably confident of a turnout that means we’ll break even. Any other location would for us be a huge risk. Events like these new ones help us to gauge realistically the potential turnout in another city. Going forward, you never know.
Keep in mind too, Web Directions is just two people - we don’t employ anyone else, though we do outsource quite a few tasks - and we also run another enterprise as well - so there’s only so much we can do logistically. It’s hard to describe just how logistically complex even an event like Web Directions is.
Thanks for the query, and hope this goes some way to outlining why Sydney is the home to Web Directions - at least for now.
Then again, with great turnout in these cities, you never know!
john