Successful 6th annual FeWeb Conference

Yesterday evening I attended the 6th annual FeWeb Conference in Edegem, Belgium with my Ibuidlings collegues Ivo Jansch, Harrie Verveer and Bjorn de Haan. Also fellow co-founder of PHPBelgium and soon-to-be collegue Felix De Vliegher was there. According to their own blog over 200 persons attended this year's event that had several short tech-tracks and 3 key notes.

I first attended the "Battle Flash vs AJAX" between Peter Elst and Peter-Paul Koch and although it wasn't really a battle, it became clear that there's much to say about RIA's in general.
You can find the presentation on slideshare (where else ?).

After the break FeWeb chairman Marc Mestdagh announced the planning for 2009, followed by handing out awards to the FeWeb Quality Label winnars (Webdoos, 2MPact and Media Mates).

Wim Roggeman of the Belgian Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) talked about copyrights and the new social infrastructure of the Internet today. Nice to see that he's using the succesful computer gaming industry as a showcase how the music industry should work today.

Final keynote was given by Luc Beirens, chief of police for the Federal Computer Crime Unit (FCCU), where he gave an interesting talk about e-crime today and how cyber criminals use the same networks as we to operate (except they're not as visible). A few interesting facts he mentioned were:

• India has now "cyber soliders"
• There are still many security issues related to input validation and filtering
• Identity theft will become a serious threat
• There's a need for a global jurisdiction to fight off cyber crime
• End users should have some responsibilities as well (ref. driver's license)

Twitter was heavily used during the sessions, making it possible for people who couldn't attend to have an idea what they were missing (#feweb).

Of course the drinks and social event were also a highlight of the evening, talking with so many people and discussing ways to promote PHP in Belgium. Through this post I wish to thank everyone for their input, we will work something out.

Many thanks for the organization of FeWeb Conference 2008 (and the sponsors Combell and bSeen).

FeWeb is an organization for web developers in Belgium that provides information about legal concequences linked to the job as "web developer", interacts with the government and the industry to advocate the role of the industry and issues a quality label for Belgian web development agencies.