tenpastmidnight blog

In November (2007) Wired Sussex and it's partners expanded their usual Digital Festival to take in a whole month of events, rather than the few days of previous years. Many (most) of the events were carried out by local groups who aren't affiliated with Wired Sussex, and the Festival offered an umbrella of advertising for all of them.

I had quite a busy festival...

As one of the organisers, my friend Matt asked if The Farm would run an event. After chatting about it a while I agreed that we'd organise a Hack Day, which would appeal to developers, as I felt a lot of the events that had been planned were good for designers, but not so good for the more technical crowd. So I organised a day-long event.

Ian and Jon ran a Start Up Day, and invited David Rosam and myself to do a talk on SEO, which we were delighted to give.

The Brighton Web Awards was back and they once again asked The Farm to judge an award, and as organiser I got to present it.

And finally I went to a usability evening put on by Use8

There was plenty of other stuff happening, including a week of Skillswaps, a special Geek dinner, and some Flash events, all of which I missed due to illness and event-fatigue.

I think it was a good idea to do a lot of events in one month to show how much is going on in the community in and around Brighton. However, with so much happening, pretty much an event every day or evening, I found I got very tired and had to really pick and choose what I went to. Talking to some of the people who ran the events, turn out was lower than I'd expected for some of them, which I think reflects that other people were picking and choosing as well.

Hopefully the festival will stay quite large next year, but I'm unsure how to balance how much stuff is put on with the amount of people who actually go to events. It might be better for there to be slightly less stuff, but give people a chance to go to everything they want. Hmm... I'm open to ideas about how to 'fix' this, it could be that it'll just be a case of "tough, you can't get to everything", which is certainly a fine and understandable attitude to take if you're organising a festival!

Labels: brighton, brightondigitalfestival, digitalfestival, events