The Where 2.0 Conference , which is organized by Brady Forrest, is  unique, primarily because the focus is on innovation in the
geospatial sector.  This year we had speakers explaining how to build a DIY Drone (unmanned aerial vehicle), a fantastic view of the universe called Celestica, building a programmable GPS device using open source hardware, digital cities, and modelling crowd behaviour, to name just a few.  The other unique thing about Where 2.0 is that there are no parallel sessions.  This is achieved is by having many short sessions, 10-14 minutes each.  This means that it is physically feasible to literally hear every presentation.  Another unique thing about Where 2.0 is a relatively high proportion of presentations addressing how humanitarian causes can be assisted by web-based technology. For example, we had sessions talking about sustainability, green maps with the freeways removed, disaster technology, a talk about InSTEDD , which is an open source platform for responding more rapidly to humanitatian crises, and a talk about Ushahidi , a web site monitoring election violence in Kenya.  There were also more mainstream presentations by John Hanke of Google, and Vincent Tao of Microsoft.  John had a surprise guest, Jack Dangermond of ESRI, and Vincent showed something really fascinating that looked like Photosynth integrated into Virtual Earth.  Video recordings of all the sessions are available on the Where 2.0 web site and I would encourage you to look at as many as you can.

Folks who come to Where 2.0 are serious about what they are doing and are prepared for hard work.  Several of us, Jeremiah McKnelly, Chris Claydon, and myself, gave a three and a half hour lab on creating
web 2.0 applications on an open source platform.  I was surprised at how well attended it was, over 70 people showed up, about half of whom were not developers. I was even more surprised by everyone’s perseverance, because we took everyone through installing Oracle, Apache, MapGuide, MapGuide Studio, FDO, and the open source FDO Oracle provider developed by Haris Kurtagic of SL-KIng.  But it is a tribute to Jeremiah and Chris that just about everyone,  including the non developers, left with a real live running web mapping application.  We have held this type of open source web mapping lab at several conferences beginning with GeoWeb when 40 people showed up for a 6 hour lab in Vancouver, and 39 people left with a running open source web application.   So there is clearly a lot of interest among both developers and non-developers.