Carsonified

Just wanted to let you know we’ve been working hard on the new FOWA Road Trip page. Make sure to come out and have a beer with us!
Our new designer Elliot Jay Stocks really done an amazing job - beautiful design and beautiful markup.

Hope you all can make it to FOWA in London in October. The lineup just keeps getting stronger and stronger!

We’ve just added:

• Matt Mullenweg - WordPress
• Om Malik - GigaOm
• Kevin Rose - Pownce, digg and diggnation
• Mike Arrington - TechCrunch

Om and Mike are going to have an on-stage debate about the future of web apps, Kevin is going to talk about the things they learned while launching Pownce and Matt is going to give some amazing pointers on creating community and growing your app.

It’s going to be a really fun two days.

FOWA Road Trip!

I’ll be hopping in the FOWA van and touring 11 cities across Europe, so come out and join me for a drink at the local bar. We thought it would be really fun to get everyone out from behind their laptops and out for a nice night on the town. It’ll be a fab opportunity to meet like-minded web app folks :)

We’re going to be throwing some money behind the bar, so please come out and say hi. The FOWA Road Trip site will be launching soon, but for now, you can see all the cities and dates at the holding page.

Our first true expo is now available for booking at The Future of Web Apps.

We’ve created a great opportunity for any size Web company to gain exposure to our expected 3000 attendees, a 3m x 3m booth is only £2195 and that includes a shell, carpet, electrical and internet connection.

We also want to encourage any non-profits and .org’s to exhibit for free. If you are a startup looking for exposure, or an established company looking to get in front of a serious enterprise attendee, please contact Andrew Calvo at andrew [at] carsonsystems dot com for more info.

I’m really excited to say that we’re launching The Future of Web Apps Expo in October 2007 in London!

Here are some quick facts:

• Registration opens June 11th - If the last three events are any indication, it’ll sell out quickly
• Three new tracks: 1) Development 2) Business/Marketing 3) Showcase. We felt that the audience at FOWA was getting more diverse and a single track event wasn’t always relevant to all of our attendees.
• We’ve invited two amazing conference chairpersons: Simon Willison (Development Track) and Brian Oberkirch (Business/Marketing Track). They’re going to help us create a presentation lineup that you won’t want to miss.
• We’re adding an expo. We want to give you a chance to meet potentially valuable suppliers and get a good view on what’s going on the industry. An expo is a great way to do this. Early bird Expo seats are only £5!
• We’ve switched to a really exciting new venue! The event sold out and the old venue was jam-packed, so we decided it was time to give everyone a bit more space.

We’re so excited! For more info, please head over to the new FOWA blog.

Brian and Simon are going to be blogging about their choice of speakers on the blog, so please participate in that conversation and let us know your thoughts.

(This is a response to the following posts: Jason Kottke, Anil Dash, Eric Meyer, Tantek Celik, Dori Smith, Shelley Powers, Kimberly Blessing and Virginia DeBolt)

FOWA was a huge success, based on the following things:

• I had a large numbers of attendees shake my hand and sincerely thank me for putting on the conference. I think that says a lot about the quality of the conference.
• We received a large number of emails from folks who said they can’t wait until next year.
• There are hundreds of positive posts about the event on the blogosphere.
• We helped people connect with each other by doing the following:
• Colour-coding badges based on people’s type, i.e. ‘Developer’, Designer’, ‘Investor’, etc (I know this isn’t perfect, but it’s a great start).
• Allowing people to wear big badges that said either ‘Looking to hire _____’, ‘Need a job’, ‘Want to invest’ and ‘Need investment’. I heard a lot of great stories about how people found jobs and connected because of this.
• The FOWA Lounge, which attendees can log into and request to meet other attendees (needs improvement but again, it’s a great start).

We are extremely proud of the event and we feel that we successfully encouraged, inspired and connected the European web app community.

However, we can always improve.

Why weren’t there more women speaking?

Jason Kottke recently pointed out that there isn’t a large percentage of women at web conferences these days, specifically citing FOWA.

I’d like to set the record straight. FOWA has dramatically improved in the diversity department. Here are the facts:

• FOWA London 2006: 7 men, 0 women (0% women)
• FOWA San Francisco 2006: 13 men, 0 women (0% women)
• FOWA London 2007: 13 men*, 1 woman (7.14%)

In addition to improving the number of women on stage at FOWA London ‘07, we also had a much more racially diverse speaker line-up than previous events.

Although 7.14% women isn’t amazing, it’s a definite improvement.

Frustratingly, Kottke (and several other bloggers) didn’t ask us for the complete story before they posted.

In fact we invited three women (Kathy Sierra, Gina Bianchini and Tara Hunt). Kathy was behind on her emails and only got back to us one month before the event, at which time all the slots were full. Gina accepted and was billed as speaking but had to cancel at the last minute and (thankfully) Tara could make it.

If we had gotten all three women we invited, we would’ve had 21.4% women speakers.

Open Mic Slots

We specifically made an effort to diversify the speaker line-up by offering something brand new called an ‘Open Mic’ slot. Attendees could pitch their speaking idea and all the attendees could vote on the presentations they wanted to hear.

There were three slots of 15 minutes each. We had no say in picking these presentations. It was completely up to the attendees who ended up on stage since they voted for their favourite.

None of the ideas were submitted by women. This was a great opportunity for women in the industry to put themselves forward for a speaking slot. But unfortunately none materialised.

The next event

Bleating about the fact that there are no women on stage without offering solutions is counter productive. In the past year we’ve made a big effort to diversify our speakers but we’d still like to improve the number of women on our stage. So here’s what we’re going to do:

1. Ask for your help. This is an open call for presentation proposals. If you’ve got something exciting to share with FOWA attendees (whether you’re male or female - we don’t care), please add it to the FOWA Writeboard (password: 123) or email me personally (ryan at carsonsystems dot com).Please do not submit cleverly veiled product pitches. They will be ignored. We will however be looking for confident speakers with a clear message to convey to the web application building industry. If that’s you then we want to hear from you.
2. We’re also going to invite some smart folks to help us put together the program. We’re the first to admit that we’re not perfect - We don’t know everything that is going on in the industry. You may think we’ve snubbed you by not inviting you, but the truth is that we probably haven’t come across you or your work. I’m hoping that by enlisting some smart folks, we’ll be able to cover more options.

I had a great conversation last night with two very talented female developers. We agreed that one of the major problems with getting more women on stage is that women often don’t promote themselves to conference organisers. If you’re a woman in the web apps industry, and you’re mad talented, please email me. Please don’t assume we know you and are specifically not inviting you. This will be a tremendous help to us in creating a more balanced line-up of speakers.

You need to deserve to be on stage

We are going to continue to improve the ratio of women to men at our events.

However, I want to make it very clear that we’re not going to put anyone on stage that’s shouldn’t be there, no matter what gender or race they are. It would be actually be worse to have women on stage who aren’t qualified, then none at all.

Of course there are many qualified women, though. So we’re going to keep seeking them out!

Is lack of diversity the real problem?

Joe Clark made an excellent point about diversity in the IT industry:

I am waiting for someone to disprove my contention that the barriers to success in information technology are poverty (can’t afford a computer) and disability (cannot use it), not sex.

The computer does not have an opinion about whether or not you “are wanted”; women have no barriers in *using computers* for their own purposes.

Not only do we need to increase the ratio of women to men at conferences, we need to focus on empowering those with disabilities or those in poverty.

As conference organisers, we can immediately make a difference to those with disabilities by making our site and event more accessible. However, we need your help.

If you have a disability and you would like to attend FOWA, please email me (ryan at carsonsystems dot com), call me (+44 79688 10 253) or IM me (AIM username: ryanleecarson).

All of our venues are accessible and we will reserve a special seat for you if you have hearing or sight problems. Regarding the website, we need someone who can go through our site and check it for accessibility problems. If you can help please e-mail me.

If you have a screen reader, I would love for you to record yourself going through our site so I can actually hear what it’s like.

I’d also like ideas on how we can make the physical events more accessible. We’ve obviously made sure they’re wheelchair accessible, but if we can do anything else, I would love to know.

For the record, one of our attendees was almost completely blind. We allowed him to bring a helper to assist him in navigating the conference. I hope to do more of this.

Get involved!

Frankly I’m tired of people blogging about this issue and doing little or nothing to fix it. We’re committed to working on this by doing what I’ve stated above.

I’d like to congratulate Brian Oberkirch on his brilliant idea for increasing diversity. We’re going to donate $2,000 to help start his fund, and we’re excited to see what happens!

If you’re as passionate about this as we are, be a part of the solution by getting in touch with us and helping make the event better. Don’t be the person on the sideline who just rants and raves.

Onwards and upwards

We’re very proud of FOWA. It’s a world-class event with amazing speakers and talented attendees. However, we’d like to keep improving. I hope this post is a positive step in that direction!

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* Jason Kottke said we had 27 speakers at FOWA London ‘07. This isn’t correct. 14 of those speakers were either teaching workshops (which attendees had to pay extra for), were sponsors, or were sat on a panel. They were either not directly chosen by us (sponsors) or they never set foot on the main stage.

Yesterday was the second day of FOWA (got a third day of workshops today), and I’ve gotta say … it has been so fun!

We’re going to be giving away all the conference audio and presentations (pending approval from speakers). Stay tuned here and I’ll let you know when they’re ready.

The program

We worked extremely hard on the program and I think it came out very well.

Based on browsing the blogosphere, it seems that the majority of the attendees agree with me (Read/Write Web, 23 Musings, David Mytton, Alex Little, Digital Telepathy, Tim Anderson, Izeo and Femmaissance) and a few that didn’t (Jonathan Mulvihill and Meg Pickard*).

Big announcements by digg and Netvibes

In addition to the quality talks by the speakers we also had two big announcements that happened at the event and I was delighted to see the coverage on the blogosphere. The two biggies that where announced:

1. Kevin Rose announced that digg is going to support OpenID
2. Tariq Krim announced the new version of Netvibes (with cross-platform widget compatibility) and that they would also support OpenID

Got some great coverage for FOWA on big-name sites, including:
TechCrunch

• digg OpenID support
• Google rumors
• Netvibes cross-platform widget compatibility

Read/Write Web

• Day One
• Day Two

Gigaom

• digg OpenID support

Wired

• London 2.0

BBC

• Event coverage

It’s an amazing honor for us to have companies like digg and Netvibes making major announcements at our event (and the coverage on the blogosphere is wonderful as well).

Photos

Here are couple event photos. Get the full Flickr treatment with the tag fowalondon07

Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) explaining the evils of slow code

Mike Arrington preparing his post about Netvibes

What I learned

I’m exhausted and can’t find the energy to recap the amazing talks, but here are a couple quick points that had an impact on me:

1. OpenID is the future
   Simon Willison’s talk on OpenID, plus the announcement made by digg and Netvibes really prove this is serious
2. We need to build a mobile web app
   Daniel Appelquist’s talk about mobile really proved to me that one of Carson System’s future web apps needs to be focused on the mobile market
3. Venture capital isn’t as confusing as I thought it was
   Ben Holmes (Index Ventures) gave a tremendously valuable intro into funding and how it works. If you’re considering VC to fund your app, you need to listen to download the MP3 and slides from this talk (available soon). Ben really took the mystery out of the whole process.
4. Commiditization of IT is a beautiful thing
   Zimki and Amazon talked about their services that make building web app simpler. They’re not right for everyone, but it is certainly a game-changer

See you at the next FOWA

We’ll be bringing FOWA to the USA in September. We haven’t decided which city yet, so feel free to let me know where you’d like to see it!

* Meg emailed me and asked to be taken off the “Didn’t like the event” list :) She said she wasn’t impressed at first, but by the end of the event she was really glad she attended. Sweet!