About 5 weeks ago when I was doing the dishes it suddenly popped up to me. "Steemit is great, how cool would it be if many steemians from all over the world would meet in real life". And so the idea of SteemFest (working title SteemCon) was born.
Tbh the whole Steemit launch and vibe reminded me of the early days of Twitter, where you got to know so many new people in such short time, but only online, and when we finally met at a meetup it was epic. I still have many friends and acquaintances from that period.
This idea of a global "conference" to enable steemians to meetup kept 'bugging' me and I started talking to some people from the community on Steemit.chat how they would feel about this... Overall the response was: "Great! when can i book my flight?" So i knew I hit somewhat of a "want" here...
I really like the local meetups and they really add value to the Steem ecosystem but for SteemFest the "vision" is to bring many steemians from all over the world together to nurture new IRL relationships, learn from each other and just have great fun.
Since this idea was "kinda big" from the get go I wanted to have official endorsement by Steemit HQ in the USA so I reached out to 
Ned, I'm dabbling with the idea of having some kind of bigger get-together... Like a conference but not too corporate but try to embrace the Steemit frontpage feel in a day full of diverse content... Sort of Ted X meets Pecha Kucha etc. Best of confs (imho) is to meet other people and most fun I recall was meeting twitter people for the first time IRL...
Amsterdam could be a fitting place, but I am biased... but might be nice to cut ties from home for a few days 🙂 Have you guys thought about something like this already?
Before coding I studied Hospitality Management, worked at a festival for a couple of years, and have afterwards organized a couple of hackathons (organizing 1 at the moment too).
Think about it...!