Quoting Fred Moyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Spend time developing mod_perl related talks and submit them to events. I spent a lot of time developing talks for smaller workshops first, and am now submitting those talks to larger events such as OSCON and ApacheCon.
I guess i wonder how you encourage people to do that sort of stuff though. How do you help get people out of the audience, and up at the mic?
Europe has a decided advantage in that the concentration of users is over a smaller area than the US (making a generalization here, but one I think that is reasonable). Flying from one end of North America to the other is more costly and time consuming than flying from one end of Europe to the other, so I think that may be a factor.
Most of the European workshops are very regionalized, and many of them have preference for the local language as well (see: http://www.yapceurope.org/workshops.html ). So i'm not sure how many people are really flying around Europe to go to the workshop or not, that'd be something that would have to be asked of the organizers. In North America though, it's definitely an issue.
It's expensive. I paid for myself last year and slept on a couch at a friend's place, and it was still a lot of money (even with my committer discount) My employer paid the year before, which was great, but I got a lucky break in that instance :) The big conferences are for profit events, and most attendees rely on employers footing the bill for their employees. I've dropped about four grand out of pocket in the past two years on conferences, I was lucky enough to have a well paying job but unfortunately the employer wouldn't pay for conferences on those occasions.
I wonder if the cost of the registration was less significant if that would encourage more people to participate.
I've often thought that it would be cool to have a mod_perl conference/workshop, but the mod_perl community is a subset of both the Perl and Apache communities, so it seems like the audience is more limited than it would be at ApacheCon or YAPC. It is generally a lot easier to encourage and facilitate mod_perl user attendance at an existing event rather than putting on a separate event.
The other bonus of just getting more people to submit talks for YAPC is that it gives puts people in front of people that might not really know anything about mod_perl, so an opportunity to educate people about it, and maybe bring in users.
mod_perl is such a powerful tool, and it seems like so few people even scratch the surface of what it can do. I'd love to see projects coming out that were authentication agnostic, so you could just plug in whatever auth you want and drop say a forum, or a blog, into an existing site with huge userbase with a minimum of fuss. PHP has tons of application level stuff, but none of them integrate (in a single sign on sense) with each other without huge headaches. this seems like something that could be done easily, and well in mod_perl. but i digress...
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