ALT.NET Seattle 2009 is happening.

If you attended ALT.NET Seattle least year, you might be wondering whether or not it's happening this year.

While at Kaizenconf, a bunch of us wondered the same thing. David Laribee, Chris Bilson, Kelly Leahy and I chatted about hosting another ALT.NET Seattle conference. David basically told us it was time to pass the reigns, if we wanted it to happen, we had to make it happen. Well after returning from the conference, we started brainstorming on the idea at our local ALT.NET monthly open-space and thanks to a bunch of efforts from our local guys....

I am excited to announce that we are actually going to host an ALT.NET Seattle conference this year.

  • What: ALT.NET Seattle 2009. (The site is still being worked on. Thanks to Justin Bozonier and Shoshanah Bain for getting the site up).
  • Where: Digipen (thanks to Jeff Tucker for lining up the space)
  • When: Evening February 27th through March 1st.
  • Registration: Opens this tuesday evening at 6PM PST. We're holding on registration to allow the word to spread. There will be a max of 150 attendees. Check the wiki on Tuesday for details.

If you've never been to an Open Space event all I can tell you is it will defy your expectations. This is not simply sitting in a room listening to speaker after speaker. This is an organic conversation that emerges based on an agenda that attendees put together on site. At open-space everyone is a speaker, and everyone is a listener. You just have to experience it.

If you haven't heard about ALT.NET or what you have heard is not appealing, let me tell you from first hand experience what it's about. It's about you. It's about being  a better software developer. It's about learning and sharing. It's about  using all the tools (patterns, practices, frameworks, etc) at your disposal to get the job done. It's about growing. 

The event will be immediately before the MVP summit, rather than after.  We decided to do it earlier for several reasons. First several folks gave us feedback that having it after the MVP summit was tough due to being worn out from the week. Second as a lot of folks are traveling from a-far, having it after meant that we have to cut Sunday pretty short to allow for travel.

Things will be a little different last year than this year.

  1. David and Scott are off the hook for organizing it :-)
  2. Two full days of sessions (preceeded by an evening kick-off on Friday)
  3. We're opening the doors  on attendance, and severely limiting the reserved slots. We want the attendance to be as diverse as possible.  You don't need a secret decoder ring to get in :-)
  4. Unfortunately Stephen List (Doc) won't be facilitating as he has a conflict. We're looking for a top-notch facilitator to fill his place.
  5. We're looking into having some kind of evening coding challenge. The point here is to do something that's fun and learn at the same time.
  6. We're looking into telecasting some of the sessions over livemeeting for folks that can't attend.

If you've been to previous ALT.NET events and have any suggestions, please let us know.

We look forward to seeing you in Seattle (well technically Redmond)  the end of February!

PS: We're also looking for sponsors for the event who are willing to contribute financially. If your company is interested, contact Bobby Johnson who I am sure will be posting on this shortly.