organize a webdesign conference

I spent some time at a conference over the past few days discussing with a collegue the need for more than a technology conference in the Atlantic Provinces. Together, we agreed that the lack of a forum east of Montreal and north of Boston for brainshare between web professionals is somewhat frustrating. To this end, we will be working together to try and get something organized for next summer – stay tuned, detail will be coming as we sort them out.

I organized the Design Engaged conference in November. If you keep it small, and try to limit your organizational responsibility to finding a meeting space, planning only a couple of all-group meals, and one or two miscellaneous things, it’s not really too hard. My goal was not pull off a thousand-person extravaganza; but to figure out how to do something that 25 people would really love. I was able to do this with about $4000 budget (everyone paid for and organized their own travel and accommodation costs).

I suggest you try to identify a small group of core people who you couldn’t have the conference without, and ask for their suggestions on what kinds of topics or who they’d like to see at it. Around the same time, try to figure out what sort of budget you’ll need and try to fix a registration price—this is not as easy as it sounds, especially for a first-time event. Write me and I’ll be glad to talk to you some more about it.

It would be really neat to organize a webdesign conference on the east coast here. We have IT Works! in Saint John and some other IT conferences (including NAWeb in Fredericton) but nothing else (that I know of) that is mainly a couple of days of learning new things in our profession; from CSS techniques to sessions on content management, to usability/UI issues, and so on. So how does one organize something like this?