Startup Weekend Vancouver - Let's Talk Turkey

 Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects. It takes place in cities across the globe and over the next three weeks it will be taking place in two of Canada's most vibrant startup communities - Toronto and Vancouver.

Toronto's Startup Weekend takes place on September 24-26th at Ryerson's downtown campus and according to lead organizer Chris Eben the event is poised to be a huge success. The speaker list is the who's who of the Toronto startup community, the list of sponsors is long, and not surprisingly the event is SOLD-OUT.

Conversely, Vancouver's Startup Weekend takes place on October 8-10th. The event's website is bare in comparison with a speaker list that includes two guys that aren't from Vancouver and a couple of sponsors/partners. Tickets are available across all seven ticket types.

Sure the Toronto organizers have a two week headstart on the Vancouver event, but I think that may actually BE the problem.

You see, Vancouver's Startup Weekend takes place on Canadian Thanksgiving weekend.

But how could that happen? Who would organize a 2+ day event on a Nationally recognized long weekend which has always ended on the second Monday of October.

A little further digging and you'll see that Vancouver's Startup Weekend isn't much of a community-organized event at all. The organizers hail from Seattle where American Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November.

Four days ago Vancouver community evangelist Boris Mann has suggested a date change to the event organizers, pointing out that there is no way they would run the same event on American thanksgiving. There response was to add a Saturday night Thanksgiving dinner to the schedule.

Is this enough of a concession? Will you be attending Startup Weekend Vancouver on your Thanksgiving long weekend?