This year, I co-organised Scotland on Rails ( http://scotlandonrails.com/ ) - the first regional Ruby/Rails conference in the UK. We attracted around 100 delegates and 20 speakers from all over the world - both local developers, and more famous names (including Koz, Jim Weirich, Bruce Williams, and David A Black).

By all accounts the conference was a great success for the delegates, the speakers and us as organisers.

We'll talk about the basics - like choosing the venue and the dates, but we'll also cover some stuff that's a little more involved - like choosing keynotes, collecting payments, organising a charity day, and organising shirts and programs.

If you're interested in community building, and you think your local user group could run a conference, the talk will help you make your own mistakes instead of ours.

About Alan Francis
I used to be a process consultant working with XP and Agile. I was the third independent signatory on the Agile Manifesto. I spent a long time working primarily with Java, and now I'm going to be doing Ruby development pretty much full-time working with EdgeCase and FiveRuns.

I've worked for ObjectMentor, ThoughtWorks and eXoftware and with clients like Coca-Cola, JPMorgan, Egg and AOL.