We are in the planning stage for the Delphi Developer Days event 2011, a two-days in-depth class focused on Delphi I'm organizing with Cary Jensen (and Loy) for the next spring.

As in the past two years, we plan focusing on some of the Delphi foundations, but also bring developers up to date with the latest features introduced in Delphi XE. The goal is to provide a fast-paced learning and brainstorming event, alternating parallel sessions, joint presentations, discussions, and networking activities. Plus deliver a lot of content through a massive course-book. Like it happened with the successful events over the last two years. In 2009 and 2010, in fact, Delphi Developer Days has been one of the events of the Delphi community with the largest number of attendees.

2011 US Locations

For the next year, we are planning to run our events in the April / May time frame. In the US we are looking for a East Coast location (possibly Baltimore, again, as it worked nice), while the second stop is still very open (Texas, Mid-West, North-West...). It is unlikely we'll add a third stop like last year, but nothing has been decided at this point.

We are looking for cities with an airport hub, a local Delphi developer community, a nice place to visit... but it is hard to get everything in one place. If you have suggestions (meaning you have to tell us "I'm coming with so many friends if you pick my city"), feel free to drop it as a reply to this blog or by writing a request on the Notify me page of the DDD site.

2011 European Locations

In Europe the event will probably take place in May. We are likely to hit Frankfurt again (worked out very nicely last year), but we might not repeat the event in London, and certainly not downtown: last year we had a good group, but almost everyone flew from outside the UK. Alternative locations? It might be some other city in the British Islands (Dublin, Manchester...), somewhere south (Nice, Barcelona...), a city on the east (like Prague). Again, nothing is given, including the fact that there will be two stops. We want to have small groups, but large enough to sustain the event and make it interesting for the attendees in terms of networking opportunities. Again, if you have a proposal we'll be very open, but in this case we also need strong support by the local Embarcadero representative. 

What About the Rest of the World?

In the past we also evaluated other areas of the world, like India, Japan, Australia, Brazil, but the increased costs for flying there, the need of a local co-organizer, the language barrier, and the need of lower the price to match the needs of the local economy have discouraged us. Since the world is not out of the economic crisis, it seems a bad time for bold experiments,, but again if someone would approach us with ideas and a group of "pre-booked" attendees, we'll be more than happy to reconsider.

What About an Online Option?

The final option will be to give the opportunity to people to attend without traveling, setting up an online event, or recording the presentations on a DVD or anything in that league. Overall, it will be very hard to replicate the current experience with those mediums, and most developer are not willing to pay for an online event a similar amount of money to what the pay for a face-to-face one. I'm probably among them. 

This doesn't mean an online event is not possible, but that it should be significantly different, and we'll need to provide way more interaction than in the classic online conference you see these days. Most settings are OK for a conference, while Delphi Developer Days in much more of an interactive event, with lots of questions, detours, and flexibility build into the schedule.

Your Feedback and Ideas

In any case, as you can see if you're read the entire post, we are welcoming any form of feedback, comments, suggestions, ideas. At this stage, we are very open. As we roll out a plan, it gets more and more difficult to make changes. Not only on locations, of course, but also on the actual contents. As I mentioned earlier, feel free to reply to this blog or by writing a request on the Notify me page of the DDD site. We already had good suggestions, since we announced the early plans at CodeRage 5.

I'm meeting with Cary and Loy next week in the Netherlands, and than again in a month in Italy, and we'd like to have the event planned by the middle of November. Stay tuned.