This year, we as the collective behind the UK PowerShell & DevOps User Groups, are running the third PSDayUK event, the only Conference that is totally Dedicated to PowerShell here in the UK & will be held on Monday September 30th at etcVenues, Birmingham.
I have already been asked by a few people about why we have decided to move the event this year, and a small part of that comes down to the overall event financials as running an event like PSDay or even the larger PowerShell Conferences like PSConf Asia, PSConf EU and also the US PowerShell & DevOps summit are not cheap events to run, and that is not including any time that myself and the other organisers put in behind the scenes, above and beyond our day jobs, to bring events like this & the PowerShell User Groups to you all around the UK.
One of the other reasons for the move is that we as organisers of the collective are dedicated to bringing more year on year events like PSDayUK but also other smaller events like hands on workshops as well, and looking ahead, the partnership that we will have with etcVenues should then open up further doors for us as a collective to be able to do so in other cities as well. We had already come to the decision that over the upcoming years we would intend on doing some rotation of where the event is hosted, with a view to have the event take place in some of the other larger cities in the UK, with London, Birmingham and Manchester being 3 of the main cities that we had in mind. It is of no surprise, at least to me and the other organisers, that I suggested that we look to move the vent to take place in Manchester, as after all Manchester is where the revival of the UK PowerShell User Groups first occurred in 2015 as I blogged about at https://blog.kilasuit.org/2015/08/19/coming-to-manchester-october-13th-get-psugukman, However upon further discussion with the other organisers we all settled on looking at Birmingham this year, for 2 real main reasons. Firstly, Birmingham is the second largest city of the UK and what comes with that is a fantastic set of options for travelling to Birmingham, including it being relatively easy to get to via road for those that wish to drive, a very good rail network link for those that don’t, and also there is also the Birmingham International Airport which allows visitors from out of the UK (or even within) to get to Birmingham relatively easily and the Venue itself is only a 5-10 minute walk from Birmingham New Street Station, which means it’s extremely accessible to get to. Secondly as part of the collectives plans for growth we are taking the opportunity at this point in time to expand the UK PowerShell Community by bringing it to Birmingham, and in the last few days we have had some conversations about when we will see a PowerShell Birmingham group spin up and we are trying to see how soon we can get one organised for, with a view for the first week in February. For future details on this please follow PowerShell Birmingham Meetup Group where we will announce the group (twitter account will follow).
This doesn’t mean that PSDay will not return to London in future, far from it, especially as London has been a huge driving force for the UK PowerShell User Group community over the last few years and especially the last year with them managing to secure a reoccurring host & sponsor in Dotmailer, and as I mentioned in my Reflective thoughts on 2018 and a look ahead at 2019 blog post, one of the areas for 2019 for me on a personal level with the UK PowerShell Community is to see it grow even further and there are a number of cities where we will be looking at expanding the User Group community where we can. If this is something that you would like to have an initial chat about potentially standing up a new UK PowerShell community in your city then please feel free to get in touch with me directly easiest is via Twitter and we can go from there, but also have a read of this article on PowerShell.org that I wrote some time ago - So you want to form a User Group? as it gives a lot of good pointers that I found when initially setting up the UK PowerShell Communities. It does need an update and that is something that I will be revisiting in the very near future with some updates.
However, back to PSDayUK 2019, in the coming weeks and most likely around the time that we have the first PowerShell Cardiff Meetup and that I will also be appearing on The PowerScripting Podcast Returns on Jan 16th (technically the 17th at 02:00 UTC 0, but I knew what I was signing up for), I will be posting more information about the 2019 event including, but not limited to, the opening of the call for speakers, for breakout sessions and also post-conference workshop sessions, information about when we will open ticket availability and also details in our calls for sponsors. I am sure that there will be other things that we will announce over time as well.
In the meantime you can find a recap of the 2018 and 2017 events on PSDay.UK and see all the recorded sessions from previous years on the Youtube channel which also has videos from some of our other events as well.
If you have any questions around PSDay 2019, or the UK PowerShell Community please feel free to tweet the psdayuk account for PSDay items, Tweet the getpsuguk account for UK items, tweet me directly or leave a comment on this post and I’ll get back to you.
I’m looking forward to what 2019 brings the UK PowerShell Community, stay tuned for future updates.