As the Host of the Dutch PHP Conference this year, you can imagine I’m squeaky-excited about the whole event. This story goes right back to last year though, when someone (Ivo? Cal? I don’t know who) conceived the idea of including an unconference in this year’s event. DPC is easily one of my favourite conferences and although I work for Ibuildings, I wasn’t directly involved with its organisation last year. In the autumn I wrote a proposal for running the unconference, and it was agreed that we should do it. Fast forward a bit and I became the host of the main conference, which is great news but left a slightly abandoned unconference behind – until the PHPBenelux user group stepped up and will be hosting the unconference alongside our main event (thanks guys!)

I’m so excited about the unconference, although I don’t know how our wider attendees will take to it as it hasn’t been done before locally. In order to include as many people as possible (and to keep the admin overhead to a minimum) we’ll schedule during the conference, on a first-come, first-served basis. This avoids the in-crowd getting voted into all the slots in advance; the uncon is for everyone to take part, not just for the people who are already well known! The uncon will also give us space to include extra on-demand sessions where people are wanting to see more about a particular topic, or see a demo of something a speaker mentions in a talk. Managing a changing schedule in real time will be interesting, we’re planning a two-pronged approach with twitter and Joind.in and I’m hoping this will allow attendees to hear about things they want to see in time to actually see them!

Its a new venture and I’m really interested to see how it turns out … if you’re coming to the conference then I hope you will give the uncon a look (in between the other awesome sessions on the schedule of course) and also take the time to share your thoughts on this and on the event as a whole. If you’re going to be there – leave a comment and let me know :)