This is a short review of my experience at the second OpenWeb on Wednesday evening in Southampton.

I'd attended the first OpenWeb back in February which was great (before this very website had been created), at the first event I promoted a small eCommerce company called FoxyCart, I brought free tshirts for everyone and although I didn't have a speaking slot I still managed to talk for 30 seconds on what FoxyCart was all about - overall I had a nice time and met some great new contacts.

This time round things we're a little different - the event was based a new venue, the Royal Southampton Yacht Club and it started a little later and most importantly over twice as many people attended, I think the final count was 52, and only 24 people attended the first one.

The evening's beer and drinks was paid for my a web hosting company called Peer1 and Dominic Monkhouse their Managing Director also had a speaking slot; the first event was sponsored by Campaign Monitor, I'm not sure why, but this time they didn't want to put any money behind the bar - but nonetheless Peer1 stepping in and keeping us from dehydration was awesome.

The format of the event was much the same as before, there were three keynote-style slots which were filled with a variety of speakers - these keynotes allowed local businesses and freelancers to promote their products or methodologies.

First up was Lawrence Curtis, albeit nervous to begin with he delivered an informative and entertaining presentation - he spoke about the Agile Process, a different project management style which encourages more team work and collaboration. Checkout Wikipedia for some more info on Agile.

Next up was Keir Whitaker from Carsonified. Keir spoke about the Django framework for the Python programming language, he had ten helpful tips and reasons why any developer should try Django and Python - Recently I've been playing around with Python so personally this is the talk I got the most from - Elliott Kember also a Carsonified associate was at the event, and during the Questions & Answers Elliott spoke to the group about his experiences using Python and the Django framework - After the talk I had a chance to chat with Keir and Elliott, for me this sort of networking and handshaking was the best part of OpenWeb.

The last talk of the evening was Dominic's from Peer1, he spoke about employee engagement - personally I got the least out of this talk, only due to not managing 10s or 100s of people and not having to conduct employment interviews on a regular basis, however, some of his tips and management techniques could apply to any size business, so overall it was great.

At the end of the talks the event's organiser, Dan Griffey from Slipstream Studio announced that Paul Boag, a web industry celebrity would be speaking at OpenWeb III, I'm sure this will bring in even more numbers than this months event!

And finally there was an after party held at the pub next door, it was a great atmosphere and everybody had a chance to network and exchange business cards.

Comments are open on this blog post.