Webstock takes place at the Wellington Town Hall. It’s a lovely, ornate venue, redolent of an age of soaring ceilings and stunning plasterwork. It’s a venue that lends itself to a sense of occasion.

Photo by Matthew Buchanan

As you can see, we sit people around oval tables, rather than in rows of lecture style seating. This came about by accident in a sense. Prior to the first Webstock we were looking at the venue and it happened to be set up for a dinner, with oval tables set about the auditorium. It just looked right, and we made a decision to do things that way at the conference. What it means is that instead of sitting in a row, where you can maybe talk to people on your left and right, you’ll find yourself sitting around a table with 10 other people. Complete with room for your laptop, power outlets for everyone and ubiquitous wi-fi. (Yes, we’re assured this will be rock-solid for the conference!). We think it makes for a more social conference.

Of course it also means that we can’t fit as many people into the auditorium as with lecture style seating. There’s a limit to how many we can seat at the tables and we reached that last year, having to close registrations a week out from the conference start. We’re nearing that limit this year again, so we’ve decided to open up the mezzanine floor of the auditorium.

Here’s a couple of photos showing how this looks.

Photo by Keith Miller

Photo by Peter Asquith

The mezzanine floor offers a great view down to the main stage and we think will appeal to a number of people throughout the conference. It will also allow us to have a few less tables downstairs in the main auditorium, meaning the back tables won’t be quite as far back as previous years.

Bottom line: We’ve got slightly increased overall capacity over previous years. There’s more choice on where to sit. We’re filling up the available space quickly.

Don’t wait too long to register!