Posts Tagged ‘conference’

As part of my push to attend more conferences this year, and get out into the real world, I recently attended PHPNW12, a PHP developer conference that took place in Manchester.

I arrived on the Friday night and checked into the hotel across the road from the conference, the Britannia. With it’s sweeping balconied staircases it felt like I was in a 70s horror movie. The floors creaked and the light in the corridor outside my room flickered on and off constantly – indeed, it rather ruined the mood when they fixed it.

The Friday night featured a hackathon, though not feeling too well due to the tail end of a cold, I spent about 20 minutes hacking, then ate my pizza while I checked my emails for an hour and headed to bed, not to emerge until 12 noon the next day when I felt a bit better.

The talks were on the whole good – there was a real range in there, some had really interesting topics but due to their lack of experience presenting talks, where rather dull. Others were confident and entertaining speakers who despite presenting quite dull topics (caching is not going to be mega interesting) presented brilliant talks. On balance, I would certainly prefer them to focus more on speaker quality over topics next year.

On the Saturday night there was a social including dinner, at which I spent quite a bit of time getting to know some of the other people at Sky – I didn’t realise they were going as I hadn’t gone with Sky, but it was great to see some familiar faces there.

Overall, I found I learned a lot from it. If I can bring back just a few ideas to my own business then it will have been worth the expense.

Staircases in the hotel. I also tried the new panorama function on iOS6, on it’s side:

David Cameron recently addressed the Conservatives at their party conference, which has never been his strong point, but he make some points that really hit the zeitgeist.

The two phrases I think are notable are that he wanted to “get behind people who want to get on in life” and that he did not have a “hard luck story” but said that “I am not here to defend privilege, I’m here to spread it”.

This has been a topic of much debate in recent times, given the rise of the victim mentality that plagues increasingly more people as they define themselves by the disadvantages that we demand should automatically entitle their opinion to credence.

This is a strange concept – the idea that you can solve privilege by granting yourself the privilege to hold opinion while refusing to grant others such a privilege, but it never the less one that has been widely adopted and as a result, caused a strong backlash.

It also potentially opens up an avenue for the Tories to try and position themselves as the new workers party. With Labour being a sad joke and the Lib Dems being the sniveling sell-outs that we currently are, I don’t think we should rule out the possibility that people will be sold on this message (I also grow tired of fellow Lib Dems constantly tweeting about what the Tories are doing – it’s our fault their in government!).

Cameron knows his audience, and it isn’t us, so he isn’t trying to appeal to us. He knows who he can win votes from and he is going after them aggressively. So maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a particularly bad speech after all.

I would just like to congratulate my friends in the various north west humanist groups that were involved in the inaugural North West Humanist Conference which took place last weekend. Unfortunately I missed the event due to illness (gutted, as a Yorkshireman I can’t stand not attending events I’ve already paid for) but it was never the less a big success and I look forward to attending next year.

As announced last month, Sunrise Conference returned for a second year to provide community leadership training to those who want to start, run and manage local community groups.

This year’s speakers included James Murray, Nicola Jackson, Paul Thomas, Lucy Adams, Michael Burgess and Chris Worfolk.

If you missed the conference, don’t worry, we’ll be making all the talks available via Worfolk Lectures. You can follow Sunrise on Twitter to get the latest updates about when the videos will be available. You can also see the photos on Facebook.

A big thanks to all our speakers who gave up their time to share their knowledge and experience!

Prior to the Sunrise Conference 2011, we held a pre-filming event for those speakers who were unable to make it on the day. James Murray was on his way to Stockholm while Nicola Jackson was heading out to Uganda to do some volunteer work, so both had to pre-record.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Sunrise Conference 2011, our second annual conference on community leadership and activism. Join us on Saturday 3rd September for a day of learning and sharing ideas and experience in running local community groups.

Sunrise ran for the first time in 2010, featuring talks, workshops, seminars and discussions from community groups leaders from across the UK.

This year’s event will be run as a virtual conference, streamed live across the internet so you can attend from wherever you are based. Best of all, registration to this year’s event is free, so it is accessible to everyone.

Registration is now open, so sign up today to reserve your spot.

After the success of the Enquiry 2010 Conference in Birmingham last year, we’re pleased to announce that Enquiry will be returning for a second year!

Enquiry 2011 will be taking place April 16th-17th and this year will be taking place in the beautiful city in Edinburgh, during the Science Festival. The event is being run in association with Edinburgh Skeptics and speakers already confirmed include Professor Richard Wiseman, Professor Paul Braterman, Jon Ronson and others.

Registration will open shortly, you can find out more details on the Enquiry Conference website.

The first weekend of September will play host to our new national event, Sunrise Conference. Hosted by LUU Debating Society in association with ourselves, Sunrise will bring together leaders of free thinking groups from across the UK to share ideas, knowledge and experience.

The conference will feature multiple streams aimed at local groups, student groups and also provide training for those wishing to volunteer as humanist chaplains. A full timetable along with a list of speakers already signed up to speak at the conference can be found on the website.

This summer Birmingham, UK will play host to Enquiry 2010 Conference a national conference for atheists, humanists and sceptics on the topic of “atheism in the 21st century.” With three days of events, a dazzling array of speakers and all profits going to charity this is not an event to be missed!

Guest speakers include Professor A C Grayling, Professor Chris French, Andrew Copson, Maryam Namazie and many others plus more guests still to be confirmed. There will also be evening entertainment and plenty of opportunities to get to know other conference attendees throughout the weekend too.

Enquiry aims to to bring a greater level of understanding on contemporary issues but in addition to that all profits are going to the Foundation to support the work we do including the Humanist Action Group, Humanist Communities and our work to support student groups. We’ll also be presenting some brand new initiatives which will be unveiled at the conference!

The event will take place on the first weekend of June – Friday 4th to Sunday 6th at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Birmingham. We very much hope you can join us there! Find out full details on the Enquiry 2010 Conference website.

Where to begin, where to begin?

There is so much to talk about. We’ve just come out of a whirlwind conference for the AHS. I guess the logical place to begin would be at the start. But I’m not going to start there. I’m going to start in the middle and work my way round in some kind of circular motion.

First of all, we now have an AHS. While I am a firm believer the AHS began at our June conference, because that is when it actually began, was named and became “something” but as of Saturday we now have a ratified constitution and so are even more “official.”

Secondly we now have elected representatives. Congratulations to Norman, Jenna and Tom who have been elected president, secretary and treasurer respectively. Myself, Alex, Chloe and Andrew have also been appointed as trustees. Hmm, thinking about it, we should probably let Andrew know about that 🙂 .

All in all it’s been a busy, busy weekend. We started on Friday with One Life (which I will blog about later) then had some drinks in The Terrace and then headed down to the German Christmas market. Saturday consisted of looking at the constitution and society presentations followed by dinner at L’oranise, drinks in The Old Bar and then Wendy House and then we finished up on Sunday with breakfast at Wetherspoon’s and some roundtable discussions. Still once it was all done I could go home and relax while I tried to catch up on all the freelance work I still had to get completed for Monday 😀 .

It was great to see everyone again and meet a new few faces too. If I thought I packed a lot into the weekend it was nothing compared to the amount of jokes and puns that Stuart and Greg from Edinburgh managed to fit in. Even if they did start to grate on certain other conference delegates by the end of the weekend 😛 .

We also recorded a “live from the AHS conference” edition of the podcast which will be available from Friday, providing I get it edited together in time lol. All in all, a very productive weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone again next year.