Back in Seattle Again
Published 17 years, 8 months pastAn Event Apart is coming back to Seattle in June 2007, and the only major differences are that it will be two days instead of one, and this time we’ve got a roster of nine fantastic speakers.
Of all the Event Apart venues of 2006, I think the Bell Harbor International Conference Center was probably my favorite. Every place we visited last year had its own unique charms and flaws, but at Bell Harbor I really felt like the charms were maximized and the flaws minimized. So we’re bringing AEA back to Bell Harbor on June 21st and 22nd, as we announced this morning.
Nine speakers seems to be our target for these two-day events, and fully two thirds of our Seattle lineup will be different than our Boston lineup. (The repeats are me, Jeffrey, and Jason.) For your edification, we’ll be presenting:
- Tim Bray, father of XML and possessor of many fine hats
- Jeff Veen, Wired alumnus and very tall person, now at Google
- Andy Budd, leading member of the Brit Pack and our first international speaker
- Khoi Vinh, dog lover and Design Director at NYTimes.com
- Shaun Inman, the brains behind Mint, IFR, IPC, CSS-SSC, and a whole lot more
- Local hero Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine and web standards provocateur
- Shawn Lawton Henry of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Oh yeah.
That’s all completely awesome, but there is a catch. There’s always a catch, isn’t there? The catch is that the seating available at Bell Harbor is strictly limited. Once we sell all the seats they have, that’s it, all done, finito. The seating capacity at Bell Harbor is about two-thirds that of our Boston show, and Boston is on track to sell out. Registration for Seattle will open March 15th, so now is the time to prepare. See you in Seattle!
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Ryan Irelan » AEA Seattle (again)
[…] AEA Seattle (again) – An Event Apart is coming back to Seattle and will feature Tim Bray as a speaker! What a great idea! […]
I hope at some point you guys make it to Denver. We get passed over too often…
Denver was in fact seriously considered for this year’s calendar, Chester. It just missed making the cut for two reasons.
First off, we knew that with the increase in size, we’d need to base at least half our calendar on cities where we’d already found strong support. Seattle and Chicago were two such, and Boston was pretty obvious given its proximity to other strong-response cities from 2006 like New York and Philadelphia.
Second, Denver is reasonably close to Seattle, so we knew that Denverites could fairly easily make it to Seattle, or to California, which is another planned 2007 destination. Of course, the reverse applies: were we to choose Denver, folks from the west coast can get there pretty easily, and Denver could also draw from the center of the country. In the end, we felt it a better choice to go back to Seattle, being one of our biggest hits of 2006, and put off Denver until a later time.
So it’s a very strong candidate for 2008. Assuming we were to choose Denver, what would you say are the best months to hold a conference there?
I went through Denver International during May one time. Seemed pretty nice then. Just my opinion.
It really depends on if you want people to be able to plan other activities around the conference. If you think people might want to ski or snowboard during a weekend, then sometime in February would probably be good. May or September would be my other choices, as it isn’t quite as hot here then, and I don’t think that the conference season is in full swing at that point here. I could be wrong on that last part though.
Alternately, I might also recommend doing at one of the ski resorts west of Denver. They all have ample conference space, and it makes for a nice locale, in the winter or the summer, with plenty of outside activities.
Eric, I was at AEA Seattle last year, and had the time of my life. Great discussions, a wonderful city, and an incredible venue.
You couldn’t have announced this at a better time. My company’s currently setting the budget for this year’s events, and needless to say AEA Seattle 2007 is our choice again. We’ll be there with bells on.
Incidentally, will you be setting aside more time for site/code reviews? Last year the time slot was woefully short.
See you there!