In the Made by Many office we've been limited to 60 people which has meant a scramble for tickets each month. We really don't want to move the meetup away from here just yet as we feel that the location and intimacy of the venue bring something extra to the event. Therefore we thought that it would be best if we took our meetup and expanded it to a day long conference.

Over the last month or so Andy and I have been hunting for venues, figuring out costs, emailing potential speakers and doing a whole host of things to prepare. Planning a one day event certainly has been a step up for us, but we've persevered and have been able to secure a fantastic venue that's perfect for us.

The event will be held on Saturday 28th September at the Lilian Baylis Studio in Sadler's Wells Theatre from 10am - 6pm. You can see the schedule for the day on Lanyrd and read the full details on our event page.

It's been our objective to keep the event at a reasonable price that an individual can afford without having to ask their boss to fund it. We feel that with our £20 ticket price we've been able to do this – we sold out of our first batch of tickets in well under an hour and from the reaction on twitter I guess the community have been pretty happy with it too.

In terms of speakers we've had a fair number of proposals for the day event but have yet to finalise a lineup. In fact, we've found this process most difficult as Andy and I haven't wanted to have complete control over the event. We've been hugely inspired by the awesome Ruby Manor and their community driven approach through Vestibule. We wanted to create a similar community around Front-end London, so we've created a super simple Rails application that allows you to sign in via Twitter and vote for the proposals you want to see on the day.

Each of the proposals on the voting app have been anonymised and only Andy and I know the author of each talk (we will be exempt from voting). By anonymising each proposal we hope to remove any associated bias.

The voting app is available online today, but is in a browsing only mode. It'll be open for voting on 27th August and will stay open until 13th September. After that time the 8 talks with the most votes will be selected for the day and the names of the speakers and number of votes for each proposal will be revealed.

We know this approach isn't perfect, but we're hoping that by opening it to the community we can get a fairer selection process and the community get the talks they want. Plus if all goes well hopefully we can use this application for future FEL events. Oh, and if you'd like to use it for your event, please feel free; the code for the application is open sourced on GitHub.

Hopefully if this mini conference is a success we can think about stepping it up to something even bigger, or maybe even take it to another country... For now though I'm just incredibly thankful for the awesome community around FEL and hope that we can keep producing events that people want to attend and come away from feeling inspired.