Fronteers 2009 — phew

Well, Fronteers 2009 was an astounding success if the Twitterfeed is to be believed. That’s good because it cost us an astounding time to arrange it all.

I did a session on the mobile web. I haven’t uploaded the slides yet because I’m going to give this presentation again at Full Frontal on 20 November. When that one’s done I’ll release the slides.

Some impressions:

• Boy, the venue was hot. Especially on the first day. On the second day I managed to arrange for some oxygen flow, but it was tricky.
• Next time I’ll hire a dedicated conference doctor. Molly, Jonathan, Ben, Chris, and Nicole were all in various states of unwell-being. Obviously they all showed up for their presentations, but still it might have been good to give them a nice shot of some medicine or other.
• These speakers have insane schedules. Worse, sometimes they don’t send me the right flight information, so that my taxi service won’t work perfectly.
• The speakers were happy, and favourably commented on the organisation. Cool. I aim to please.
• Chris Heilmann will make a naughty joke about that last sentence, but so be it. Bring him on. I can handle him.
• Thanks to the volunteers who took on various small or not-so-small chores and made my job considerably easier. Vasilis van Gemert, Kilian Valkhof, Wilfred Nas, Justin Halsall, Jelmer van der Linde, Herko Coomans, Jan Paul Posma, Jan van Hellemond, Hidde de Vries, Leendert Ullersma, and Thijs Reijgersberg.
• Extra special thanks to Krijn Hoetmer, who is best known for keeping the IRC logs of various important web standards groups, but who also takes on many Fronteers 2009 tasks such as attendee administration, finance, webmastering, and keeping the official conference feed going. Without him Fronteers 2009 would have been absolutely impossible.
• About 300 attendees, about 200 of them Dutch and 100 of them from about ten other countries. Fronteers 2009 is definitely an international conference.
• The small size of the group made for an intimate atmosphere you don’t find often at larger conferences.
• Obviously, the conference parties had no music. Nobody minded.

Thanks, speakers, attendees, and volunteers. It was a lovely conference.

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