> I know what the argument for the results of Pycon 2008 will be: we > needed the money. My answer: it's not worth it. If this is what you > have to do to grow the conference, then don't. If the choice is > between selling my experience to vendors and reducing the size of the > conference, then cut the size of the conference. Keep the quality of > my experience as the primary decision criteria, or I'll stop coming.
This commodification of "eyeballs" is happening in the Ruby community, as well. 2008 seems to be the year of Ruby conferences, and both organizers and attendees have been entirely complicit in the gradual dilution of interesting, un-biased presentations. As a result, many of the most innovative members in our community no longer show up. This is a real shame. My friends and I decided to stage a grassroots Ruby conference this summer; it will have no paid sponsors for exactly this reason. We're trying to change up the typical format as well: it's a single-track event, no "keynotes", no schills for well-heeled interests. We're even organizing activities for significant others traveling with conference attendees so that everyone has a good time. The response we've gotten to this approach has been curious; many people totally get why these things are important, and the speaker list reflects this. However, we've also had a lot of complaints that our event is too expensive. In fact, they say that it should be free, like a BarCamp. Just get a bunch of sponsors, and that will be the ticket. We say bollocks to that. http://rubyfringe.com/ I'm posting here because even though the Python and Ruby communities are seen as being in some sort of competition, I personally believe that we have more in common (and lots to learn from each other) than we are credited for. For example, the popular Haml template engine is white-space sensitive, and that's a direct nod towards Python syntax. Thanks for your post, Bruce. You've given us a huge boost that we're doing something right, here. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
