Plone Conference 2010 Venue Announced

With about seven months until the Plone Conference rocks up in Bristol in October, we've been busy securing the venue. We are now proud to announce the Plone Conference 2010 will be held at the 4* Thistle Grand Hotel in central Bristol.

The hotel is located in the central old part of Bristol City, with its cobbled streets and old buildings. We have four rooms booked in the hotel for the main conference, the largest holding 400 people, the others holding around 90 people each. The hotel also can offer us around 60 rooms for delegates to stay in during the conference, and there is a wide number of other hotels of various costs, serviced apartments and youth hostels in walking distance.

There is also plenty of social life around with a large number of restaurants, bars and clubs within a few minutes walk. All delegates will also have passes to the hotel's leisure centre as well.

But beyond all that, this hotel actually has quite a nice historical connection with what we are doing. Our main aim with the work we do with Plone and on the internet in general mostly revolves around communication. We allow others to communicate information better. Whether that be by designing public facing websites, private corporate intranets, or group collaboration spaces... we enable communication.

The Thistle Grand stands on the site of a previous important link in the world of communication -- the mail. Before the Grand Hotel there stood the White Hart and White Lion Inns. Looking at the lithograph above and the modern photo at the top you can see the same church tower behind the site of the venue. The White Lion Inn can be traced back to 1606 as an Inn and went on to become a very important part of the Kings Post:

"The White Lion, Bristol, was one of the most famous coaching houses in England, east, west, north, or south. It stood in Broad Street, a thoroughfare which belied its name as regards breadth, and could only be considered broad by comparison with the even narrower Small Street, which ran parallel with it. Yet at one time there were as many coaches passing in and out of Broad Street as any street in Bristol, or even in London!"

This excerpt it taken from a book originally published in 1905 entitled "The King's Post -- Being a volume of historical facts relating to the Posts, Mail Coaches, Coach Roads, and Railway Mail Services of and connected with the Ancient City of Bristol from 1580 to the present time." published online by Project Gutenberg.

Back then, with no telegraph or telephone (or even internet!) Bristol used to even have its own time, being 2 degrees 30 minutes west of London it was approx 10 minutes behind London on time, evidence of which can still be seen on the clock above the Corn Exchange in the centre which has two minute hands, one for London and one for Bristol:

With the advent of the railway, and Bristol's famous son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel who build the Great Western Railway, Bristol Time was subsequently abolished and Railway Time adopted in 1852.

Anyway, that is the history lesson over. The main thing to be excited about is we have a venue :)

We are now currently selecting a venue for the conference dinner/party and our shortlist includes a former railway terminus (the world's earliest surviving purpose built railway terminus), an art gallery, a victorian bank, and an arts and media centre. We just need to work out which one will work out best for us!

As for talks, training and all that... We'll be putting a call out for training proposals and talk submissions once Plone Symposium East and European Plone Symposium are out of the way. We will be opening booking for the event in June.