A couple of years ago, we ran a series of awesome one-day conferences in ten cities called Stack Overflow Dev Days.
People had a lot of fun (read the reviews) and learned a lot, and we've been scrambling to get our acts in gear to run more conferences.
One thing we decided was that 10 cities is unbearably exhausting. We decided to focus on four conferences:
- London
- Washington, DC
- US West Coast (probably Bay Area)
- Australia (probably Sydney or Melbourne)
The conferences will most likely be in September or October, although exact dates can't be determined until we've got all the venues nailed down.
We also decided (based on your feedback) to run these as two day conferences, not one day... the one day conferences were exhausting and didn't leave enough time for socializing and informal networking kinds of stuff.
What's this conference about? The idea for the original DevDays was to have high-bandwidth, intensive introductions to a wide variety of new technologies... the kinds of technologies that everybody wants to learn but doesn't necessarily need to use on a project right now. Last time, it was things like iPhone development, Python, jQuery, Google AppEngine, etc. This year, we're asking you. So far, there's a lot of interest in DVCS, HTML5, and Node.js.
Who's picking the speakers? You, of course. This is a community project! We're setting up curriculum committees for each of the four events, and we need your help. If you are interested in joining the curriculum committee, please participate in the Meta discussions:
Each curriculum committee will work to decide what talks they want to hear, select speakers, and invite them. We'll take care of the speakers' and committee members expenses, of course, and we'll do all the work of actually putting on the conference.
