Dutch PHP (un)Conference 2010





About a week ago Amsterdam was shaking since Ibuildings organized another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference at the RAI, hosted by Lorna Jane (@lornajane).

This year was also the first time uncon sessions were available for the audience to give 15 minutes (lightning) talks or full 45 minutes presentations. Both Stefan Koopmanschap (@skoop) and I (@DragonBe) were given the honor to host these sessions as part of our community involvement with the PHP user group PHPBenelux (@phpbenelux).

Since we were hosting these sessions, most of the awesome tracks I could only follow through Twitter (@dpc_uncon) and IRC, which helped me a lot to get an idea of what I was missing. But on the flip-side I had the privilege of attending the true community at it's best through the uncon sessions.

The thing with uncon sessions is that regular attendees can step up and prove themselves as future conference speaker material. All talks given at these uncon sessions are rated by other attendees on joind.in, and these ratings are looked at by conference organizers to select unknown speakers, especially if they have to invest a lot of money getting these speakers at their gig.

As a result of this feedback system on joind.in, one of our uncon speakers Martin de Keijzer (@martin1982) got himself a spot on next year's Dutch PHP Conference, as was announced at the end of this conference.

All people that talked at these uncon sessions, had interesting stuff to tell and educated the audience in an impressive way. Only a handful of uncon speakers came prepared, but most of them just created some slides during other sessions or had nothing at all, but still got their message out or started a very interesting dialog. If uncon king, Mr. Keith Casey (@CaseySoftware) was with us, he'd say we did a great job.

If you're planning to attend a PHP conference in the future, think about the uncon sessions. They have great content, stir up discussions and can offer you a spot on the main tracks of any given PHP conference.

In my final note I need to thank Stefan Koopmanschap (@skoop)) for covering me during my work related absence. You rock dude!

Big gratitude goes out to Ibuildings, who have given us the room for running the uncon sessions and for providing an uncon main track spot on next year's conference. Clearly you guys set the standard for PHP conferences!

If you attended the Dutch PHP Conference 2010, do give those speaker some feedback on joind.in and don't forget to rate the conference as well. Speakers and conference organizers need your feedback to improve their talks and/organization so they can give you the quality you're paying for.

Looking forward seeing you at DPC11 for your chance to speak !

Location:Rai, Amsterdam

Comments

  1. It was really nice post. I was surfing around for this from quite long. It was really helpful.

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