Community | Web Directions

While it didn’t make it to the list, I fear this word has probably become so widely and thoughtlessly used as to render it meaningless, so it probably should have a place on this other list. However, for want of a better term, I shall push on regardless.

I’m sitting here going through my database of previous attendees, thinking about how to do a final mailout about the June 30 deadline for early bird pricing. Looking through all these names always gets me thinking about the first time we ran a web development conference here in Australia, what seems like centuries ago. How humble it was, and its 220 attendees, its single track, its presentations on topics which seemed so vital then, so quaint now.

There’s a lot I could say about that content, and how it has changed so much over the intervening years. How sessions such as User Experience in Online Communities and Ajax or Flash: what’s right for you?, not to mention Mashups, Web Apps and APIs would not even have been bleeding edge. We simply did not have the vocabulary to express these ideas in 2004. What’s great to see is how quickly, and even painlessly, this revolution has happened.

But what I really want to take this opportunity to do is thank those 220 people who did find out about us and come along in 2004. Without you 2007 most likely would not be happening at all, or it would be some massive product oriented event run by some faceless corporation, possibly not even based in Australia.

Without being creepy about it, you were our true founders.

What’s great to see is that at the same time as the idea of an online community has taken off and spawned more web applications than anyone cares to think about, a genuine offline community has found fertile ground, and flourished here in Australia. I’m intrigued by the relationship between these two communities, the online and the offline: the nodes at which they connect to each other, and how we as individuals pass seamlessly through the porous barrier that separates them, what we leave behind, what we take with us.

Stay tuned.