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

Bruce Lawson, and Opera Software, recently interviewed us about Scroll and the conferences. For those interested in knowing a little more about the conference, or the magazine, there’s quite a bit of detail there.

In particular for those interested in the conferences, we tried to go into a little of detail about what is most important to us about the conference, and the way we do things. Here’s a little taste

A couple of other things that are important to us:

1. We hate panels. When people pay good money, and spend a lot of time and effort coming to a conference, they need detailed, practical, well prepared material. Panels are almost invariably under prepared, and the signal to noise ratio is low. Mostly they are about opinion. That’s what bogs were invented for. We have had the occasional panel, but even then, every presenter had prepared a detailed presentation, and most of the content of the panel was those presentations.
2. We try really hard to find women, and other under-represented people in the industry, as presenters. The industry is full of a diversity of people, and yet, it seems we often see the same folks on stage time and again. We also tend to have a very high percentage of women attendees at our conferences, in Australia as high as 40%, which by tech conference standards is extremely high.
3. We try to make our conferences as affordable as possible – with very reasonable prices and very large discounts for students. Basically, our price point is around one to two cups of coffee per working day of the year.
4. We strictly separate content and sponsorship. There is no relationship between a sponsors support, and speakers on stage. That’s not to say that there might not be a speaker from one of our sponsor companies, but these speakers will definitely be there on merit.

It’s not to say that any of these is unique to Web Directions, but I think all these together make for the particular great value, rich content, high quality, enjoyable events that Web Directions have become.

for more like that, head over to Opera’s developer blog.