Last night, I talked to Justin Kozuch, the executive director of DesignFest ’05. DesignFest was a new media conference held in Toronto in October, and Justin has intention on holding this every year. So it turns out after all that there is a Canadian-based web design conference.
So my new question is two-fold. First, can (should) Canada support another web-design conference? If so, should it still be located in Toronto?
My first impression is that Canada can support another web conference, but that it would need to be be western-based. That being said, I’m not from Toronto, and not very familiar with the market there.
I’m interested in others’ thoughts on this.
I had a look at the speaker list for DesignFest ’05 and (to the best of my knowledge), there were only two people there talking about standards and structure: Derek Featherstone and Tara Cleveland. It appears that the rest of the speakers dealt with graphic design and flash.
If this is the type of conference you are interested in, then you might not want to compete with DesignFest. If you are looking for a different type of conference, then we should proceed with the “plans”.
DesignFest, from my understanding, sprang forth as a more diverse conference than Flash in the Can. as a result, it was about design, Flash, standards, and a whole slew of things. Is the conference currently in discussion perceived as being less diverse than DesignFest?
As well, it should be noted that future DesignFest conferences will have a more expanded agenda (multiple days, for example).
Are you kidding? Come to Calgary, we would kill for a conveference like that.
-Ryan
Er, conference – darned typo gnomes.
I’m from Ottawa, Ontario, the capital of Canada (often confused with Toronto). Ottawa is 2 hrs from Montreal, 4 hrs from Toronto, and a hell of a long time away from Vancouver, to give you an idea of our geography. Teknision (www.teknision.com) and Fuel Industries (www.fuelindustries.com) are two local shops you may have heard of. If you want to go to where the people/press are, I’d say Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal are all your first bets, Ottawa would be beautiful but I would completely understand your not dropping by this way.
And maybe I speak for myself here, but I’ve had enough of just flash conferences, or even conferences with a bias towards flash coolness (sorry teknision and fuel). Standards, as dry as they may seem, need to be appreciated, and the work we do now will be work we won’t have to do later when they become the life-blood of the web. i’d suggest focussing on that? If you want the flash coolness crowd, a focus on destroying the stigma of nice looking stuff vs. standards-compliant stuff…. we don’t all have to make useit.com’s.
Kim said that I hadn’t commented yet, so here’s my comment:
Great idea, I’m super keen on it. Places like Vancouver & Toronto are a bit scary because of the cost (both to organize and for hotels for participants etc…). Calgary is still pretty reasonable for pricing, the logistics would be easy to coordinate, and there is a pretty big base there — a lot of companies servicing the oil & gas industry. It’s also a little more central (it’s no Regina though) so that people from both the east and west could attend.
Any way you slice it — sounds good to me.
Hi Everyone,
My name is Justin Kozuch, and I am the Executive Director of DesignFest. The comments/arguments that you have presented are all very valid, whether you agree with them or not.
Myself, I take a very neutral position, as I represent the whole of the organization, and because DesignFest is committed to bringing quality programming to our events. We try to cover all the topical angles, however, it’s very hard to get everything crammed into one day. We are changing that for next year.
In fact, many of the topics you folks have mentioned are things that we are going to have speakers talk about at DesignFest 2006. Currently, blogging for business is a big one, and is something that we would like to see at next year’s event. Of course, we would like to get more into web standards, accessibility and that area of the web. AJAX, Web 2.0 and technology of that nature are also on the bill.
If you have an idea for a topic, feel free to drop me an email via the DesignFest website. I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
Cheers,
Justin Kozuch
I think there’s definitely room for another conference. I would personally like to see some focus in the conference. With no deference to any other conference, what I’ve seen have been Flash conferences, and “Web Design” conferences, which I think is too broad a topic for a one day conference. I’d love to see a Web Standards/CSS & Accessiblity conference come around.
Oops…I got carried away and forgot to touch on the topic of this post.
I would assume that the majority of web professionals in Canada are in Southwestern Ontario, which would make Toronto ideal, but I could be wrong.
Perhaps a poll is in order?
Adam: You’re right. The reason why Toronto is so ideal/attractive is because of the sheer number of web professionals that live and work in this city.
Naturally it makes sense to have a conference of this nature in this city, however, that’s not to say that having it elsewhere is a bad idea.
I often will travel to conferences/speaking engagements south of the border to places like Detroit or Cleveland.
We had a number of people come to DesignFest from as far away as Poland (!!!) and California. So people will travel; they just have to know that what they are going to see is of value to them. Clearly, we have succeeded in this venture, and there is no doubt in my mind that Kim and his team will too.
Kim already knows what my feelings are as far lending a helping hand, so I’ll leave it up to him to post his comments about that if he so wishes.
Something I learnt a long time ago. The best conferences pull people from their home base and don’t go to their home base.
While it might be more costly (more people have to travel), more bounding goes on when everyone is from out of town. People just naturally get together to figure out the new town and what to do after the conference. Perhaps that’s why New Orleans was such a popular place for conference (very few people from their ever attended the conferences).
I spoke this past summer at a conference in Portland Or. Most people were from the American North West and only perhaps 5-10% were from Portland. This one day conference and wrap party really saw people getting together making business connection and just general networking. Something that wouldn’t have happened if everyone had to rush back to the office or home to finish off something.