Last week, we made a little history when over 70 speakers and 500 attendees from around the world congregated on the Interwebs for the <head> web conference and, in doing so, took part in creating the world's first virtual web conference. Last week, thanks to you, we proved that there is a new model for conferences that is engaging, environmentally-friendly, and affordable.
Voilà, l'âge de la Conférence 2.0 commence
Presenters spoke from home, from hotels, from our local conference hubs in London, Brighton, and San Francisco, and, in one case, from a car parked on a street-side in downtown New York City.
I'm overwhelmed by the wonderful reviews I'm reading from attendees and speakers alike, as well as the lovely feedback we've been receiving directly. I'd like to share some of this with you here, starting with this gem from my friend Jeremy Keith, who opened the conference with his excellent talk on The Long Web:
It spanned three days and as many continents. It was a preposterously ambitions undertaking and, incredibly, it worked! (Read the full post.)
One of the things that I loved about the conference was finding out more about the things I had heard of, but knew nothing about (both Richard Rutter and Ann McKeekin's talks come to mind) . . . Thank you again for a wonderful conference, I'm looking forward to next year. (Jonathan Ferguson, attendee.)
I had great time interacting with the crowd by telling my stories, answering questions, giving away books and hopefully instilling some inspiration to the one hundred in my apartment. (Christopher Schmitt, speaker; read the full post.)
I really enjoyed the conference sessions last weekend. Congratulations on a great event! (Stuart Giles, attendee.)
The Head Conference was an ambitious, timely, and much needed creative exploration of the potential for "green" conferencing using Adobe Connect Pro, Second Life and local conference hubs in various cities. (Tish Shute, read the full post.)
Great job with the Head Conference. I had a blast . . . Was surprised how interactive and social and online conference could be. Already looking forward to next year. (Mark Grossnickle, attendee.)
All by all, it turned out to be an amazing experience, that not only made you realize again why you love internet, but also contributed to your sense of commitment to the . . . community. I guess the best thing I like about <head> is that you can come together, interact and learn from the cracks, sitting in your lazy chair, no matter where you are! (Jeff Winder, attendee; read the full post.)
(I won't go on so this post doesn't turn into a testimonials page — suffice to say we got a heap more of lovely reviews on the web, on twitter, and in emails — thank you all so much for sharing them with us. We're wonderfully happy by the response, and we're listening to your feedback so that we can evolve the conference and make it even better for next year.)
Undoubtedly, following the success of <head>, we are going to see more conferences embrace virtual aspects and I can only assume that we will see more virtual conferences popping up. <head>, of course, will not be standing still. We have learned tons by staging this conference and I have very definite plans for where I want to see <head> go next as we evolve and continue to explore the concept of Conference 2.0.
In closing, I want to once again thank our wonderful speakers, sponsors, micro-sponsors, and, of course, our attendees for breathing life into the conference and making <head> a success — thank you all for your support and here's to an even better <head> 2009!
Photos
Related posts from speakers
- Jeremy Keith - </head>
- Yahoo! Developer Network Blog - Moving on with the style of conferences: <head> was a great success
- Christopher Schmitt - Head Conference, The Virtual Conference
- Chris Heilmann - Seven reasons why web development is running around in circles, The art and pain of teaching JavaScript - my talk at <head>
- Seb Lee-Delisle - Reprezenting the Flash crew at the <head> conference.
- Henny Swan - Have you got the X Factor? Building websites for mobile and disabled users
- Joshua Hirsch - <head> conference
Related posts from attendees
- Jeff Winder - <head> 2008: The Future Is Here
- Tish Shute - Doing Something Useful With Virtual Worlds, Tim O'Reilly: Instrumenting the World
- Tom Morris - Taking the hat off my head, On not banging one's head against a brick wall
- Mark Grossnickle - Head conference wrap-up: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
(If you have a blog post or review that I missed, please leave me a link to it in the comments — thanks!)
The </head> article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
And a big thanks to you, Aral, for all your hard work in putting together a smashing conference. Looking forward to next year!
Yup it was pretty crazy seeing all the different places that talks were being streamed from. I was in the Brighton location at the Werks, at one point watching a talk on Second Life while the guy sitting next to me was in Second Life looking at the talk from in there! Mad!
Enjoyed it a lot :)
Aral, is anyone answering the headconference support emails anymore? All the video links for the main conference were removed this week and no-one is responding to my messages.
It’s taken me 3 months to get my employer to ‘whitelist’ the conference sessions and when the news came through on the same day as the links to all the videos disappeared I felt more than a little aggrieved.
Hi Aral,
I just happened that I wanted to review the conference videos that I had missed and wanted to catch up on what I had missed. But I realized that I could not find any of the videos, so seeing Chris’ comment, I now understand. Are you intending to put them back up?
Just wondering,
David
Well, I checked back randomly (Around Feb. 2nd I think) in the hope that something had magically changed, and it seems that it has. Links have been restored, conference sessions are working, and the errors that I’d previously reported seem to have been fixed.
Given that there’s still no acknowledgment from anyone at Head Conference it could just be temporary, but I’ll take it anyway.
It looks like the HeadConference subscription to Adobe Connect has expired and the videos are ‘unofficially’ no longer available to anyone.
Might be nice to get some kind of notification from the people we paid, but I guess I should feel lucky that I got see them at all (see my previous comment).
And the word from the folks at HeadConference? (eerie silence, cricket chirps in the distance).