Uncreative - Events

Announcing the next unconference in Hamburg

nospam@example.com (Markus) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:49:11 +0100

Hello fellow readers of PHP-Planet (at least the remaining ones who did not yet go on vacation ). After the success of this year's PHP Unconference in Hamburg, Germany, there was little doubt that the event would not remain a single incident. The remaining question was not if, but when should we do the next one? This question can now be answered: On the weekend of April 26th / 27th, the PHP Unconference 2008 will once again take place in our beautiful city. We want to stick to the proven concept of some pre-announced sessions combined with a spontaneus program that is being proposed and voted for on-site by the attendees, as this has worked tremendously well during the first installment. The unconference will most probably once again be held at the premises of the local University - we don't have a 100% official confirmation yet, but things are looking bright (also, the University officials seemed to have enjoyed this year's unconference just as much as the rest of us ). The only downside is that at the same weekend, there's a huge sports event, the Hanse-Marathon, taking place in Hamburg, which is likely to block some of the traffic on Sunday and will also have an effect on available hotels - so if you're planning on coming (and you should ), and wish to stay in a hotel, you should book well in advance. I will announce more details as they're being fleshed out - all information will become available on the unconference blog first, though, so head over there and subscribe to the RSS feed To the official unconference blog (sorry, German only for now)

Looking back at the Hamburg unconference...

nospam@example.com (Markus) — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:36:25 +0200

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.

Thanks, O'Reilly :-D

nospam@example.com (Markus) — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:49:26 +0200

One week left until the PHP Unconference in Hamburg, and finally the goodies have arrived O'Reilly was kind enough to sponsor a care package with lots of cool PHP and MySQL related books, writing blocks, pens and key-holding band thingies (what are they called again?). Among the books are timeless classics like PHP in a Nutshell, PHP Design Patterns, PHP Hacks or MySQL Internals... really great stuff! Here's what I got from them: The books will be given away to the unconference attendees in a raffle on day two... now all I have to come up with is some fun way to raffle them out Thanks a lot to Darren Cooper for contacting O'Reilly and making it happen, and of course to O'Reilly for being a cool company and supporting the Open Source community so much. On a side note, I bought a book from Tim O'Reilly himself once, who was helping out at an O'Reilly booth at FOSDEM in Brussels a few years back. It was really cool to see a Multi-Gazillionaire selling books at a rather improvised table that had a bit of a flea-market vibe to it. One can only like the guy Too bad there isn't a PHP book in my current favourite series of O'Reilly books yet, the "Head First"-series. Kathy Sierra, if you ever read this: Hint, hint