It’s official, BarCamp Vancouver is set for September 27th. This is the third annual occurrence of this event, and we’re pushing it out a little farther than its traditional late August so we can have enough time to organize it.

For starters, it’s going to be larger. We’ve got (free) registration currently capped at 225 people: please do sign up now to let us know that you’re planning on attending. Last year’s event had 80 people on the waiting list…just sayin’.

BarCamp Vancouver will also be playing host to two “sub camps” — specifically, WordPressCamp and PhotoCamp. Please do check off the appropriate item in the registration form if you’re interested in those events, so we can help estimate numbers. We’re going to reserve space and time for dedicated sessions around those two topics.

Lastly, there are a bunch of other events happening around the same time. The Thursday before — September 25th — is National Digital Media Day. Maura is planning a Launch Party for Vancouver that evening to coincide with the day, and potentially coordinated across the country. September is going to go off with a bang…

One of the things we’re doing at Bootup is to gather together best practices that we can share with startups and founders. The goal is to get the most bang for your buck, from spending money to spending your time.

When Danny and I decided on the name for Bootup, we had basic systems up and running in something like 3 hours: domain registered at NameCheap, configured for Google Apps for Domains to get email, calendaring, and docs up, and a basic website / blog at WordPress.com.

Even if you have technical people that can setup and run some of these things, your goal is to build your technology / grow your company. For instance, talking to AdHack, I quickly put them on to Unfuddle, a hosted SVN and ticket tracking system. Below are two tools that I love, and that are on the list of sites we encourage startups here to use.

I’ve been organizing a couple of events recently – VinoCamp is coming up August 16th, and BarCamp Vancouver is going to be either September 13th or 27th (you can help decide which date here). For both, I’m using Eventbrite to do registration and sell tickets. I’m evening considering using Eventbrite’s ticket functionality to “sell” sponsorships through their PayPal integration. Gathering registrant information? check. Affiliate links? check. Tracking links? check (Miss604 and TechVibes are neck and neck in sending traffic, BTW). In all, a really great tool for doing free as well as for pay events, although there are a few little changes that I wouldn’t mind seeing.

Which brings me to my next tool: how are you gathering feedback? feature requests? beefs or bugs with your product or service? Seeing a blog post by Vince at Pennyminder reminded me about Get Satisfaction. It provides a way to implement everything from bug reporting to forum discussions about your company or even specific products. While you certainly want to keep in close contact with your early users and respond directly via email, Twitter, blog posts, etc., you can promote Get Satisfaction as a more structured way. For example, a suggestion via email might get the response “Great idea, I’ve added it as a suggestion to our Get Satisfaction page - please tell other people about it if they also think it’s a good idea”. I just added Bootup Labs - you should probably at least claim your company name and monitor it, even if you don’t plan to use it directly.

What other tools can you recommend, and how have you used them? I know there are local Vancouver startups that would fit this bill, like ScribbleWiki.