Gnomedex
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Gnomedex is an annual technical conference, coordinated by Lockergnome founder Chris Pirillo, that began in late 2001, and has so far been held six times. It is not affiliated with the desktop environment GNOME. The conference is typically held over the summer on a weekend, and focuses on leading-edge social and technical trends, most recently including RSS aggregation and podcasting.
It has been traditionally held in Des Moines, Iowa, Pirillo's home town, but due to its size, moved to Lake Tahoe in 2004 and then Seattle in 2005 and 2006, where Pirillo now makes his home.
The conference consists of parties, a keynote by Chris Pirillo, and presentations by various leaders in tech-centered fields. Notable speakers have included Rob Malda of Slashdot fame, Adam Curry, Tim O'Reilly, John C. Dvorak, Dave Winer, and the Microsoft Internet Explorer development team, who at Gnomedex 2005 announced widespread RSS support in Windows Vista.
Started as a "a tech conference for everyone else", what Gnomedex is exactly about is not really known. It is geared towards not only being fun, but informative. While the conference is run professionally at high-end venues, sponsorship from large companies including Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google keeps registration fees unusually low. Another uncommon feature is a single "stream" of speeches in one room holding a few hundred people, rather than parallel series of talks and discussions as at other conventions.
The conferences have unusual themes. At 2004's Gnomedex 4.0, the theme was "Taking the 'con' out of Convention", while Gnomedex 5.0's taglines in June 2005 included "The Technology People Aggregator" and "Grassroots of RSS, Blogging, Podcasting, BitTorrent, Media!"
