As well as pulling off a great event that ran smoothly and was thor­oughly enjoyed by both atten­dees and speak­ers alike, the Web Essen­tials team have done some­thing spe­cial: raised the bar for web con­fer­ences forever.

Peter, Russ, John & Max­ine man­aged it all — a star-studded speaker lineup (more gender-balanced than most, with a good mix of both inter­na­tional and local tal­ent), com­fort­able venue, well-catered, great schwag bag. Don’t under­es­ti­mate the com­fort fac­tor — sit­ting for two days solid on uncom­fort­able chairs is, umm, a pain in the arse, espe­cially for peo­ple with bad backs like me. What is espe­cially amaz­ing is that they did it all with­out out­side cor­po­rate sponsorship.

The false alarm evac­u­a­tion proved that had their been a real emer­gency, the world would not be down three hundred-odd web devel­op­ers — a com­fort­ing thought. Plus every­one got to flickr and blog it straight away — oh the excite­ment! The wifi was a bit crap but hey — you can’t have everything.

What was really mind-bending, in a buzzword-twilight-zone kind of way — was hear­ing about and talk­ing about “Web 2.0″, while simul­ta­ne­ously par­tic­i­pat­ing in it. Tech­no­rati tags, live blog­ging, flickr pho­tos, pod­casts before the con­fer­ence was even over — there was more audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion then you could poke a stick at. Maybe I’m just still bask­ing in the after­glow, but I felt a real sense of com­mu­nity with the other atten­dees, and I’m not even fin­ished read­ing through every­one else’s WE05 blog posts.

So a big thank you to all the peo­ple who made it hap­pen — I can’t imag­ine the huge task it must have been. The Web­boys I’d met before when they came to Perth to launch our first Web Stan­dards Group event, and also when Russ kindly gave up his time to judge the WA Web Awards, and it was the first time I’d met Max­ine (web chicks unite!) and John — but I instantly felt I was among friends. Port80 are hop­ing to get the Westciver’s over to Perth for a speak­ing event next year, and Max­ine, we have lots of stuff to talk about!

So Peter, Russ, John, Max­ine — thank you so much, con­grat­u­la­tions, and I keep say­ing this but I really can’t wait until next year.

Tech­no­rati: WE05