D Developers Conference

[user at domain.invalid]

It's time to get serious about organizing the first of what will 
hopefully be many conferences dedicated to D.  There's a lot of 
questions to be asked and answered, choices to be made, and things to 
organized.

   1) Where can we hold the event?
   2) Who's going to organize everything?
   3) How many days should it be?
   4) How many people will be able to attend?
   5) How many people will volunteer to present on some topic?
   6) Lodging?  Where?  Cost?
   ... and bound to be a couple dozen more.

I can answer the first two finally, and take a stab at the others.

Where?  My employer, Amazon.com, has generously agreed to let me host it 
in our conference rooms.  So, we have as much space as we need (unless 
I'm grossly under-estimating things).

When?  I haven't yet secured the conference rooms for any specific 
dates, but planning far enough out I don't anticipate any problems. 
Depending on the number of participants and presentations, I propose it 
be held on either a Friday or a Thursday and Friday.  To give us 
sufficient time to organize things, let's shoot for August 23 through 
September 28; any one of those weeks.  IE, Aug 23-24, Aug 30-31, Sept 
6-7, Sept 13-14, Sept 20-21, or Sept 27-28.  If there's a date that 
suits those of you who can attend, please let me know.  The first date 
overlaps with another conference here in Seattle that might appeal to 
some of you, http://www.pennyarcadeexpo.com/.  While that conference 
isn't free, it's darned near free ($40 for a three day pass right now).

Length: one or two days?  That's entirely driven by how many of you can 
attend and are volunteering to speak to a room full of fellow 
developers.  I really hope that there's enough of both that we can fill 
two days to make the trip worth more.

I don't know if I can take advantage of Amazon's negotiated hotel rates. 
  Depending on the number of attendees we might be able to negotiate our 
own rates at a nearby hotel.  Group discounts will help keep things cheaper.

So.. I've set the reply-to to me, and followup-to to digitalmars.D. 
Let's keep discussion out of the announce newsgroup.  If you'd like to 
be a presenter, please send me a quick abstract / description.  If you 
intend to attend, please let me know which dates work best for you. 
I'll summarize the results to narrow down the exact dates.

- Brad