For those of you who made it, we do hope you enjoyed it, and found it useful. For those of you who couldn’t make it, never fear, content is here! Check out the conference site for presentations and selected Audio. Sessions available include the opening keynote from Senator Kate Lundy,  as well as the lightening talks from staff at councils. You can also check out some pictures on Flickr!

We’re really looking forward to next year, and are very keen for you to be more involved, so don’t be shy, get in touch, let us know what you’re interested in and want to see at the conference next year, or if you want to help out.

Conference highlights include:

• Keynotes from Senator Kate Lundy and Mark Pesce
• Plenary session from Jason Ryan
• Panel session on online community engagement with panel members from local and state government, and industry.
• Government 2.0 Taskforce workshop with Lisa Harvey

We also have a choice of 6 workshops from the basics of writing for the web, the essentials of Information Architecture, WCAG 2.0, user-centred design you techniques you can do yourself, and you can get into some coding techniques with Real world CSS, and an Introduction to JavaScript.

To help convince you, here’s me being interviewed by James Dellow giving the low-down on this year’s conference.

Diana Mounter on the upcoming Local Government Web Network Conference from James Dellow on Vimeo.

We’re happy to announce that registrations for our conference – WE Believe In Community – are now open!

Like last year we are keeping the ticket prices as low as possible. This conference is not about making money, it’s about getting people together to share ideas and learn.

Early Bird discount available until 10 July: only $475.00 +GST (that’s a discount of $75.00!)

To register, and for a full list of ticket options and prices please go to: http://conference09.lgwebnetwork.org/tickets

Conference speakers and program

We’re very happy to have recently added Jason Ryan to the bill. He will be talking about Government 2.0 in our afternoon plenary session. He is one of a great list of speakers we’re very happy to have on board this year.

The draft conference program is also now available along with a full list of speakers and workshop sessions. We’ve got a few more to add which we’ll announce in the coming weeks.

Help us out and we’ll help you out

Are you feeling generous? Do you want to get connected with the local government web peeps? Perhaps you’re looking for a bit of promotion in turn for a good deed, or maybe a free ticket? – we’re happy to hear from companies or individuals if you think you can help out.

Please visit our site for a list of the things we need help with: http://conference09.lgwebnetwork.org/help-out

Ideas Forum

Don’t forget, there’s still time to win a limited edition red iPod by contributing to our ideas forum! Your ideas and feedback will help us deliver a better conference.

If you register or comment or add/revise an idea between by 5pm Friday 12th June you will be in the running to win!

http://lgwebnetwork.ideascale.com

To get your feedback in a more interesting way, we are taking a leaf out of Web Directions book, and launching an Ideas Forum. This will allow you to post ideas, comment on other people’s ideas, and vote on the things you really like or maybe don’t think are a great idea.

Reem and I are passionate about delivering you a conference where you will come away inspired, excited about new possibilities, full of new knowledge, and hopefully new connections and friends. Your ideas and feedback will help us deliver you a conference that is suited to your needs. So don’t just sit there, post a new idea now!

We want ideas for topics and presentations, suggestions for workshops, and if you are interested in presenting we’d love to here about it.

We will post some of the ideas we’ve had to get you started. It is easy to add your ideas, and if you can’t think of anything then you can comment or vote on other people’s suggestions.

Visit the Ideas Forum at http://lgwebnetwork.ideascale.com

The conference this year: WE Believe In Community

Well we’ve decided that the name works well as community is what it’s all about, so we’re sticking with the “WE Believe In Community” theme. We’ll also be launching a full conference website next month as things got a little crammed on the blog last year!

Conference peeps and presenters

Dates:
The conference will be on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 August 2009, in Sydney. Put it in your diary now!

A change of format:
This year we are changing things slightly based on feedback from last year. We will be running a day of workshops which will likely be half day sessions, and the second day will be in a similar format to last year with split streams, a couple of plenary sessions, and the presentations will usually be from 30 mins to 1 hour.

New this year – the conference dinner!
We are extremely excited to be giving you a full conference dinner this year. This will allow a nice social element to the conference. Of course we checked out the location ourselves which will be at Subsolo Spanish Restaurant and Tapas bar. Check out Reem’s blog post for the low down on the food.

Cost:
We have not confirmed costs yet, but again we will be keeping this as low as possible. This conference is not about making money, it’s about getting people together to share ideas and learn.

Register your interest:
If you want to keep updated about the conference and be the first to know when registration is open, register your interest to receive conference updates.

We look forward to seeing your feedback in the Ideas Forum, and hope to see many of you at the conference in August.