Web Directions

Two new one day Web Directions Conferences in May — Melbourne and Canberra

• In: Blog, news
• By:John
• March 13, 2008
• Leave a response

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 16^th, 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 15^th 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 19^th, 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 20^th 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

2 responses to “Two new one day Web Directions Conferences in May — Melbourne and Canberra”:

1. • By:Adrian
   • March 16th, 2008
   

   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

2. • By:john
   • March 16th, 2008
   

   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

Your opinion: