Leeds Web Festival - On Now!

The second Leeds Web Festival is underway. Last year's festival was a festival by accident - independent events taking place over a couple of weeks that, it was noticed, shared an underlying theme. This year, the festival is a festival by choice, an inspired, cornucopic, cultural programme of technology-related carryings-on woven together to create a magnificent whole. I spoke to organiser/Agent Provocateur Imran Ali to learn more:

What is LSx 2009 and the Leeds Web Festival?
Taking place From 5th May to 3rd June, Leeds playing host to LSx 2009, a month-long festival of web culture and digital media.

The Festival is a combination of conferences, unconferences, meetups, networking events and workshops, including the Innovation North 2009 Showcase, Girl Geek Dinner, Future of Web Apps, Physical Computing 101 and the third edition of BarCamp Leeds.

How did it come about?
There was so much going on in the space of a couple of weeks last August, we decided to put a brand around everything and call it a festival. However, this year we've been more deliberate in experimenting with new formats, attracting big name conferences and starting to develop longer term partnerships with the Live at Leeds music festival and Leeds Met university. Our ambition is for LSx to become the SxSW of Britain :)

How was last year's festival?
Amazing - we managed to host an evening talk by renowned New York venture capitalist and tech blogger, Fred Wilson, as well as meetups for the city's Ruby and blogging communities, our second BarCamp and an OpenStreetMapping party.

What can attendees expect to see in 2009?
This year's BarCamp will also see the city's first Cupcake Camp - a 'bake-off' for the city's best cupcake Jedis! Also, we'll be hosting the Leeds leg of Ryan Carson's Future of Web Apps tour and a day-long workshop that's essentially a beginner's guide to Arduino, as well as speaking engagements from Seedcamp's Reshma Sohoni and Carsonified's Ryan Carson.

For more information, head over to http://lsx09.com & http://leedswebfestival.com.