Last year, I was unfortunately not able to attend the GetTogether because it was held the same day of ApacheCON. This year, I will be very glad to attend and to introduce it.
Unlike other events that are done for profit, this event was done "by the community, for the community". Rethorics aside, this means that prices are kept low, crap is cut, no fancy yet useless gadgets for your money, we all get the meat and the fun.
I was very clear when I was offered to comment the Orixo operations: if this becomes marketing crap, I won't come. Needless to say, the reply voices were loud and clear: we do this to get people together and, yeah, get some visibility by doing it.
Which I think it's more than fair enough. So I accepted to help.
In '98, Brian Behlendorf invited me to speak at the first ApacheCON, but since they didn't have enough money, I had to spend around 800$ to fly in San Francisco to speak. Yeah, that's right: I paid my own expenses to be able to give a speach that others had to pay for.
I remember exactly the words that Brian used to convince me, right when my dad was yelling at me for being such an idiot to waste time, money, energy and resources for somebody else's profit.
He wrote to me: "consider it an investiment on yourself".
Like in many others things, he was definately right. That was, by far, the best investiment I could have done with that money. But not only in terms of money earned back, but also in terms of "knowledge, fun, visibility, respect, recognition, friendship, contacts, influence" and more, in no particular order.
We are a virtual community, but we are not virtual people. Real life events are incredibly useful to *improve* the communication abilities that happen virtually.
In fact, I found out that after meeting somebody in person, I understand that person better via email. Not only I can associate the face and the expressions, but I can also understand better what's between the lines.
This is not a conference, people, it's not a stupid and boring marketing event, it's a place where we are proud to have a speaker showing us (and making us hear!) the similarities between Bach fuges and Cocoon pipelines! I don't know *any* other community where such things happen.
It's a place where you can forget about reading all those tons of email messages about flowscript or Woody vs. XMLForm or Real Blocks and *get it* in an hour [in my introduction I will spend a good amount of time describing what real blocks will be, why they were introduced and what problems they can solve you]
Think how valuable that is. Think how much energy/time/money you can save by understanding all this *now* and follow the development, instead of reading it in a book two years from now.
If your company doesn't send you, well, damn, take a few days off and pay it yourself! You'll come to meet some friends, to have fun, to learn new stuff, to meat new people, to put faces on dry email messages, to get the apache spirit, to feel proud to be part of all this, to have something that goes beyound the technology.
No, nobody is paying me for writing this. I'm writing this because the more we are, the more fun we get and the more cocoon will grow and the more fun we can get in the future.
Think about it: it's all about investing in yourself.
And in case you do, go register, so others might know how many people will come and will join even more.
http://www.orixo.com/events/gt2003/
See you there.
-- Stefano.
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