Uncreative

It's been a whopping four weeks since the PHP Unconference Hamburg 2007, which I head the pleasure of co-organizing together with a bunch of really cool people from the local usergroup - namely Judith Andreesen, Florian Blasel, Ekkehard Doerre and Hinrich Sager (order is strictly alphabetically ). Just now, after a week of vacation (involving waking up each day to the sound of chainsaws, hammers and nailguns - don't ask) I can finally breathe again and blog about it. It was a blast! I never would have dreamed how successful it came out. We were able to use the facilities of our local university, which sponsored three rooms including beamers and internet access (which was more difficult to set up, but in the end far better than at some commercial conferences I've attended ) and the mensa provided us with lunch (solid, but overpriced). For the smaller in-between snacks, Hinrich's son along with a few friends provided the catering, which turned out to be a really good idea. We didn't just sit, eat and drink, though - the weekend was packed with lots of interesting sessions, and unlike commercial conferences, the attendees were able to suggest and vote for topics they wanted to hear about. In the end, we had one track of pre-planned sessions and two parallel tracks of sessions that were planned just at the beginning of the day. Although this was precisely what we intended, we were a bit sceptical at first how well this would work out - we Germans are notorious for not being spontaneus and needing a plan even for going to the bathroom But all went well nonetheless. Ekke and especially Judith did a very great job moderating the voting sessions. Of course, due to the spontaneous nature of the program, there was not always pre-made material available, so in some cases the speakers had to make the session up as they went along, and reactivate their skills in the long-forgotten art of writing on a blackboard (yes, with actual chalk!) instead of just flipping through Powerpoint slides. I was one of them, hosting a session about form frameworks together with Soenke Ruempler. At one day, we even decided that the lunch break was too long and so a session that could otherwise not fit in the regular timetable anymore was spontaneously squeezed into the lunch break - and it was even pretty well attended I don't even know right now how many people were actually attending, but it must have been way over 50. We could've coped with up to 120, but the fewer people gave the event an athmosphere not unlike a family meeting, just with far more interesting conversations Many prominent people from the PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL communities attended. In fact, you could have the impression that the event was co-sponsered by eZ systems and MySQL, as there were so many of their employees there From what I've heard, the event was also well-received by the university people, who are keen on getting some more exposure to people working "in the field", as opposed to purely theoretical work. If we did another unconference, the university will without a doubt jump in as a room sponsor again. A few days ago there was a wrapup-meeting, which I was unfortunately unable to attend to, but Judith was kind enough to post a complete checklist of what we did and what we'd need to do if we organized another unconference - should you have similar plans in your area, go and have a look, the post is called How to organize a PHP unconference. I'm sure you'll find the information most helpful. After the huge success of our first unconference, personally, I think that it's not a question of if we're gonna do it again, just when.