It’s an interesting point you want to organise a professional event; do you go with the traditional conference / seminar format or the more relaxed popular unconference (aka barcamp).

Well having attended and been involved with organisational aspects of both it is clear they have their places. There are a number of points that you have to consider before committing to one over the other.

Organisation

• Unconference - It’s very relaxed, informal, embrace it, attendees control the proceedings.
• Conference - Very formal. The attendees will have little if any say in proceedings.

This is just getting a little bit insane! Yeah Perth has done BarCampPerth, WA Web Awards, WebJam, PodCampPerth, plus all the AWIA mini talks, and now we have few more events to round the year off, just well because we have nothing better to do than have events all the time, or as Myles Eftos suggests learn macrame.

Leading off in date order there is a free ColdFusion mini-conference directed by Adobe CFCamp (27 November 2007, 9am - 4pm), want to learn the latest in ColdFusion, register today.

Last Sunday I was sitting in the belly of a 737 at 12km’s up, hurtling across the Nullarbor Plain at 748 kmph from Sydney to Perth, with part of the Perth Posse. Hundreds of people in web community from around Australasia were then returning back to their respective towns and cities to family and loved ones. The compressed web geek week of OzIA, Web Directions South and WebJam is now over for another year. This year was enjoyable, but less intense from the previous years, which was good.

Last afternoon of Web Directions South 2007, it’s all gone a little to fast, this year there was a large number of people from under the radar. This was good. The use of the business stream at the conference would have done this.

Lisa Herrod - Usability: more than skin deep

Consideration of usability is more than just the visual layer, we have the consider the code aspect from the user experience and the technical aspects.