Well, I have good news and bad news.

The Good News: php|tek 2009 will have an Unconference!

The Bad News: I'm in charge.

(cue mad scientist laughter)

Let's be clear right off the bat:  All [name]Camps (Bar or otherwise) are unconferences but not all unconferences are [name]Camps.  The distinction - and this seems to be widely accepted - is that [name]Camp sessions should be selected day of and everyone needs to participate in some manner. Uncons can have the above but don't really have to... which is how it works at these Uncons which are attached to conferences.

Therefore, here's the (estmated) format for this con/uncon combination:

• Normal sessions start at the beginning of the day and the three tracks run until about 4 or 5pm;
• At that point, we take over and get full access to the rooms, projectors, network, and anything else not nailed down;
• We're slated to have three sessions in each room each evening, giving us a total of 18 sessions.

So here's your mission:

A couple months ago, when I was at ZendCon08, I spent a good amount of time chatting with Chris Cornutt (eygma on IRC and Twitter) who is also the founder of PHPDeveloper.org.  One of the things he showed me was his pet project: Joind.in

One of the odd things about many of these tech conferences, is how speaker/session evaluations are handled.  At many of them, the room manager hands you a printed evaluation form.  You write your comments, mark your scores, and turn it in.  And finally, month or so later, the conference organizers get back to the speakers with the scores.  For a tech conference with a tech audience with tech speakers, this doesn't make a lot of sense.

As of today, my highly esteemed colleage and pants-freedom advocate Paul Reinheimer announces a new event for php|works next week:

20/20 6:40

To put the concept simply:

The format is a little bit different than a talk (thank god) and hopefully a lot more fun. Basically the presenter gets up there with twenty slides, each are going to be shown for exactly 20 seconds, for a total of six minutes forty seconds. No take backs, no do-overs, no boring slides full of code.

The format lends itself well to quick, interesting presentations on pretty much anything.

Wow.  It's like an automated lightning talk... it has the potential to either be a glorious exchange of concepts or an entertaining session of mishaps, humor and a bit of chaos. I give even money for it to be a bit of both. 

Elizabeth Naramore is the ringmaster for this chaos. If you're interested, contact her while there are still slots left. She's at elizabeth at phparch dot com.

Some of you may have heard the rumor that Marco Tabini and I are working on something.  You might have heard bits and pieces... but very few of you have heard the full story of how it came about, what it is, and where it's going.

This post is not that announcement.

This post is about my upcoming presentation at php|works 2008! (I know, I'm a jerk.)

Well, actually it's been over for a week now, but I digress...

One week ago today wrapped the second PHP Appalachia Conference.  The first one was two years ago and consisted of a bunch of geeks sitting around a camp fire, hanging out in a small cabin, and generally having a good time.  This time around, it was quite a bit different.

The highly esteemed Elizabeth Naramore - who works with Marco Tabini* of php|Architect to organize php|works and php|tek - took the lead and found The Beast.  It's this massive mountain-top fortress cabin which sleeps 40, seats 40 in the kitchen, seats 20+ in the movie theater, and 20+ in the living room in front of the massive flat screen television.

While I seem to be talking more and more about conferences lately, this next one is near and dear to my heart... PHP Appalachia.

PHP Appalachia originally came about a few years back because... well, I'm not sure, but I've heard (I wasn't there) that it resulted in a bunch of PHP geeks sitting around a camp fire, a bit hacking away a bit during the day, and generallly building the community that PHP is known for.