We want Australia to be a bigger, more successful IT and web hub, but do we have enough people, money, skills to spread it across our big nation, or do we need to focus on a single city? If so, should it be Sydney?

i think if there's any industry less in need of being all in the one place, and most capable of collaborating remotely, it's ours.

being evenly distributed also has a couple of big benefits:

1. we're less likely to build businesses that forget about the rest of the world (how many silly valley products are only ever adopted by silly valley tech workers?);

2. we can keep profits (if any) safe from the tax man by plowing them right back into deductible business travel; and

3. it makes it harder for any one 'in' crowd to dominate the conversation. silly valley is too prone to pandering to the fruitfly-length attention spans of certain influential individuals at the expense of really considering the value of great new businesses.

I'd like to say Canberra ... but being so government-centric we'll just hold everything back by about 20 years

The city that delivers the Australian Sand Hill Road will be the IT Hub of Australia. Until that happens, initiatives like 2 Web Crew will become a beacon for the web developers of Australia. Breed Confidence.

Agree with you @alanjones that our industry is well placed for non-physical community building, but I still think that you can't beat meeting people to find opportunities for doing business.

Sand Hill Road followed the tech companies, not the other way around.

Non-physical helps, but it is about 20% effective on building families and that's closer to what we need.

Agree ... it needs to be physical. We need to think incubation space like they do with the arts. Think precincts ... cheap rents with good tech infrastructure shared and centralised

so was it the chicken or the egg?

@mick Do you think Australia doesn't need a "Sand Hill Road"? If a hub is spawned in one particular city, what will encourage developers/entrepreneurs to move there? Community for sure, but also the potential of raising capital downstream. It goes hand in hand, long term.

My view on this matter is that Aust is too small in population to enable a distributed hub of web innovation.  A single location is what is required to give this exciting industry a real sense of presence locally.

A lot of people have heard of the "Silicon Beach" phrase.  Well I believe it. We have a lot of web innovation occurring in Sydney (on aggregate) not to say its not happening anywhere else.

Melb and Bris have also proven themselves with 2 great and focused web success stories - Seek and wotif respectively.

At 3eep, we connecting and experiencing several other related entrepreneurs keen to connect physically in some way, to share experiences, learnings and the like face to face!

For me, it's Sydney ala "Silicon Beach"!  Now all we need is a Larry Ellison or the like to appear

@Nickg: Isn't that you?

http://www.technation.com.au/2008/06/05/is-an-aussie-answer-to-y-combinator-just-around-the-corner/

Either way, we need a lot of money being poured into the sector to create the hub like of Silicon Valley - we need a "Sand Hill Rd"

I disagree that we need more money. Sand Hill follows the business, not the other way around. And there is plenty of money in Australia if you try hard enough and have a good enough product. Yes, if there was better community and network, you'd find it easier, but you have to get out there and build it.

Yes, we could have a hub in every capital city, but just imagine if we didn't. Imagine if we were all in one place.

Cam
Dunc
Bron
Richard
Chris Saad
Atari Boy
Stephen Collins

Man, I wish they were all 'a coffee away' from a good chat.