Seattle needs real world, technology-focused get togethers. Desperately. Microsoft does some things and so do some of the other larger shops in town but they tend not to be general attendance-type events. There's Mindcamp. There's the Penny Arcade thing, sort of. There might be a few others we're not thinking of right now, but come on, we feel like we should be able to name a dozen or so events.

Which is why we were so happy to learn that tech publisher O'Reilly has announced a small unconference thing at CHAC. This one sounds so cool that we want to jump in the air or something, but since it's a geek event we'd probably knock over a laptop on the way down.

Make Magazine and their tech host/video blogger extraordinaire Bre Petis will be hosting a bridge building competition starting at 6:30pm on December, 7. We'll be there for the bridge building strictly as non-participants - The balsa wood bridge we built in high school could barely support the weight of the materials used to build it, and we haven't grown any engineering brain cells since then.

After the bridges are successfully smashed there will be some really smart people on hand that O'Reilly will put in difficult situations. Scott Berkun, Erik Benson, Shelly Farnham and Beth Goza will give presentations Pecha Kucha-style, which we think means that there will be slides that the speakers won't be prepared for. We've seen some of these guys talk before and fully expect them to flow so naturally that you'd think they'd been talking over the slides for weeks in their hotel rooms. And then there's a segment of the evening called 'Ask Later' that is kind of an open speaking thing.

They're still looking for presenters and other help so if you think this sounds like an event that you'd like to borrow for your nefarious purposes for a while, contact the organizers through the Ignite Seattle website.