The WWW2017, the academic conference that governs the World Wide Web, is coming to Perth to talk startup.
The “International World Wide Web Conference”, is primarily an academic conference that happens every year somewhere in the world. It hasn’t been interesting to the startup community before because it’s been largely concerned with highbrow technical matters and web standards. However this year at the WWW2015 in Florence, Italy, for the first time ever there’s an entrepreneur track.
Although not a formal part of the program at previous conferences, startups and entrepreneurs have been an integral part of the WWW conference. The last time the conference came to Australia was Brisbane 1998, and one of the presentations was a fascinating talk about “the anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine” by a couple of Stanford university students no-one had ever heard of (but you’ll have heard of them now!).
The Entrepreneur track is just getting started this year, running as a co-located track while everyone works out what’s involved. Next year at Montreal (WWW2016) it will be a larger part of the conference and we’ll start to see what works and what doesn’t, and then we get our turn in 2017: a chance to really shape the future of the conference and make it an event on the global startup calendar.
Rick Barrett is the man responsible for bringing the conference to town, and is the lead organiser for the whole thing. It’s a huge task, one that’s going to keep him cheerfully occupied for the next two years. Rick’s background is in communication, particularly online, and he ran the Digital Media Unit at Curtin. His goal is to bring together a series of web-focused co-located events, activities and social functions, a “Festival of the web” with WWW2017 at its centre. He’s appointing a number of people to organise the various additional tracks and activites, and //Startup News has volunteered to organise the entrepreneurial track.
So, we’ll be talking more about this in the next two years, and consulting with everyone who wants a say to see how we want to shape this event – please comment below or get in touch directly if you have any ideas. If anyone had any doubt about why we need a “startup community” then hopefully this shows why: it will need all of us working together to make this work, and each and every startup in Perth can benefit from this event, anyone involved in the community can directly, personally, benefit, because it’s a huge opportunity to get national and international focus on Perth. It can bring new connections, new investment, new talent and huge success. IF we get our shit together and look good for it.
The world will be looking at us in two years’ time. It’s up to us to determine what they see.
