I did a quick presentation explaining the concept of the SHiFT movement, the power of networking and also the challenges envolved on organizing such a conference.

The presentation is available on Slideshare:

The venue will be the Teatro Aberto, a great theater and inspiring space to be.

The theme this year is Do It Yourself, divided in 4 main tracks (business, web, design, ux). We will bring together the leaders and newbies of the communities we have serviced in the past 2 editions, with a single purpose: to empower you, so that you can empower others. DIY? Read why.

First confirmed speakers include: Cennydd Bowles, David Weinberger,  Kushtrim Xhakli, Lane Becker, Ryan Opaz and more will come. There’s also slots for proposed talks, why not submit your own?

The website is powered by the same platform from 2008, it’s using Ruby on Rails with a custom backend that we use to manage all the information from the current and past editions (speakers, talks, discounts, tickets, prices, new, whatever).

Thanks to this we can have a ecosystem on the website where participants can get information on who’s attending, vote on talks, comment, view videos, download presentations and more. On the coming month we’ll be adding a trick or two to this system (send me your sugestions too).

So get your ticket and let’s get inspired and amazed for 2 days this year.

The aim of UX London is to galvanise the UX community in Europe and with big name speakers like Don Norman, Jared Spool, Jeff Veen, Dan Saffer, Peter Merholtz on board it’s shaping up to be a fantastic event.

UX London combines a day of inspirational conference with four half days of practical, in-depth, hands-on workshops and the registrations are already open with the Early Bird price going for £895.

The event will take place on the 15th – 17th June 2009 , Cumberland Hotel, London. Don’t miss.

It was all very stressfull, for most of the time I was busy with action going on all the time (a request here, a request there) and I sure wasn’t aware at the beginning of the work involved in organizing something like this… but I think in the end everything went well, the team did a very good job and most people had fun or learned something from this conference.

There’s a bunch of things I want to do with the site, automate more stuff, make the registration independent from the site, remove bugs from some places and probably turn it into some kind of CMS for Conference Websites or base template.

For those who couldn’t attend the conference or a particular session, it seems Slideshare has some of the SHIFT 08 presentations online. But I’m sure they’ll be on the SHiFT site soon.

There’s also a lot of photos going around on Flickr and I’ve took a bunch of them too if you’re interested, check my Flickr Set.  In the meanwhile I’ve returned to my Ruby on Rails projects. I’ll probably post a interesting tutorial in the next few days.

Many thanks to my fellow coleages and to the guest illustrators – Lucy Pepper and Bauke Schildt – for their amazing work. See you on SHiFT 09.