With the venue booked, keynote secured, website and social media streams in place, we’re ready to officially announce WordCamp Whistler 2009 happening January 24th.

This site is your official source for WCWhistler information. Check out the speaker page, add your own submission to become a speaker, find out more about sponsorship, and check back for blog updates. You can also follow the action with the RSS feed or by adding @WCWhistler on Twitter.

The official conference tag (for Flickr photos or blog posts) is wordcampwhistler09.

Browse the site, get all the info you need, ask some questions, and register through Eventbrite. There is a fee for this conference but since we’ll be in a world-class location with top notch speakers, we think it’s worth it (and we’ll even through in some lovely swag as well).

You’ll be in charge of booking your own accommodation but we have a great group rate at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler Resort (where the one-day conference will be held).

My snowboard boots are already by the door – right next to my laptop. I hope to see everyone there for this amazing weekend of WordPress geekery, networking, and good times.

Photo: Jennifer Stoddart on Flickr

We’re very pleased to announce the location for the first ever WordCamp up in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada will be at the very prestigious Fairmont Chateau Whistler. The Fairmont chain is one of North America’s most luxurious hotel chains, and it’s a absolute pleasure that they’ve managed to make the facility affordable for this conference.

I’m also pleased to announce that the Fairmont Chateau Whistler has also offered us a really amazing group rate of $269 CAD/night. Given that it’s prime snowboarding and skiing season at one of North America’s most world renowned ski-resorts, it’s really quite an amazing rate. For those of you hoping to enjoy some of the sights of Whistler, or spend a few days on the hill, the Fairmont has also offered to extend this rate for three days pre-event, and three days post-event.

We’re pleased to announce our very first sponsor for WordCamp Whistler, Automattic. Automattic is the company behind the blogging engine that everyone knows and loves (and coincidentally, the main reason we’re assembling for this conference), WordPress. We’re happy to have them onboard as a sponsor, and are looking forward to their involvement in the event.

For other companies or individuals looking to sponsor, please visit our sponsorship page.

We’ve actually had this website ready for some time now, but have been sort of stuck trying to figure out the venue and accommodation up in Whistler. As you can imagine, January is rather busy in Whistler as it’s at the peak of the skiing/snowboarding season.

We are officially taking submissions for speakers, which you can do my clicking the appropriate menu up above. We’re also really happy to announce our first two confirmed speakers.

The first is our keynote speaker, Lorelle Van Fossen. Lorelle is practically a legend in the WordPress community, and recently gave a talk at WordCamp Hawaii. She’ll be down in Vegas right before WordCamp Whistler, but has agreed to make the long trek up North to be the keynote speaker and get in a few runs on the hill.

Also confirmed is everybody’s favourite Buddy, Andy Peatling, who is about to launch the first social networking framework build on top of WordPress-MU, BuddyPress. Andy has been speaking about BuddyPress at various WordCamps over the last year, but this should be the first event where he speaks after it has been released. I spoke with Andy a few days ago, and he said he was looking forward to not just speaking about what BuddyPress “will most likely do”, but what it in fact “can do”. So it should be a great talk.

We’re going to be opening up registration for the event shortly, so stay tuned. Right now we’re targeting about 100 – 150 people for the event. We’re also taking sponsorship, so if you’re a business or individual that wants to contribute to the success, please visit our sponsorship page.