A week ago, I bought my ticket for J and Beyond, the first international Joomla conference. The conference takes place in Wiesbaden, Germany, May 30th to July 1st.
I’ve been to JoomlaDay Norway once, but this will be my first attendance at a larger Joomla event. Also, it will be the first time I meet a lot of people I’ve been communicating with online during the past year. It will be a nice experience meeting these people whom I respect and enjoy communicating with on Twitter, Skype, Facebook and through blog comments.
If you consider attending J! and Beyond, order your plane tickets now! They are still quite cheap.
The event will be held at the Wilhelm-Kempf-Haus conference centre, just outside Wiesbaden city. A lot of the attendees will stay at the conference center, which I think is very nice. It will make the social part of the conference easier and more natural.
Locally organized
The conference is organized by Robert Deutz Business Solutions. Some weeks ago, the Joomla project was presented on one of the biggest exhibitions related information technology in the world – the Cebit 2010. The German Joomla team organized a really amazing stand and the reports show that many, many people asked their questions about the project.
Now, the Germans have joined forces to create J! and Beyond, and I really look forward to seeing what they have put together.
The program
There’s a draft version available for the time table. The specific contents of the program depends on the community proposals. At the moment the organizers are planning a keynote on each day on a special topic.
Sunday
On the first day, Sunday, there’s planned 3 rounds of 5 parallel sessions with each round lasting approximately 1 hour. In the evening there will be a social event.
Monday
Monday starts with a keynote followed by 2 rounds of 5 parallel sessions. Each round will last approximately 1 hour. After lunch there will be 1 round of 5 parallel sessions of approximately 1.5 hour. Followed by a longer second round lasting 2 hours. The day concludes with the J!Oscars event in the evening.
Tuesday
Tuesday starts as the other mornings with a keynote. Subsequently, there will be a round of 5 parallel sessions lasting approximately 1 hour each. After lunch, two rounds of 5 parallel sessions of 1 hour and half in length. J! and Beyond will conclude with a closing session and a scheduled finish to the event at 5:00 pm.
Between the sessions there will be a lot of free time to discuss in small or larger groups. Beside the program there will be vacant rooms for spontaneous sessions or talks.
Speakers
At this point, only two speakers have been announced:
- Igor Dutra, User Experience Architect
His involvement with Mambo dates back to 2003 when he joined the community and started to develop his first projects using open source tools. In 2004 he led the team who built Porsche Brazil’s website (in Mambo) and in 2006 (using Joomla). He was a speaker at both the first Joomladay UK and Joomladay Brazil.
Currently he lives in London and works for Likemind, a corporate communications agency.
- Kai Oswald Seidler
Currently Kai works as Senior Engineer/Technology Evangelist for Web Tier products at Sun Microsystems.
The title of his presentation will be: “Listen to the people!”
I will report back from the conference when I’m there, and afterwards. And I guess I will have lots of ideas for new blog posts as well.
Counting the days!