From: James Britt Date: 2006-07-28T13:43:16+09:00 Subject: Re: About last night ... M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > > a. The upcoming Ruby Conference in Colorado had 73 proposals for papers > submitted, of which only 16 could fit into the schedule, Yes, I know. :( > b. There are only 240 slots for *attendees* to the conference, while > there are most likely thousands with the means and desire to attend, and > c. Given b, people are actually running scripts to poll the conference > web site and grab the registration form, in the hopes that they'll be > one of the lucky 240. A robot to check the site ... Neat. Hope they use Etag and last-modified checks. > > I'm not sure what this all means yet, and I'm not sure it's mostly a > good thing. For example, some people who have made *major* contributions > to the language and the community will most likely be shut out of the > opportunity to attend. And interest in Ruby, as Amy noted, seems to be > far outpacing the supply of volunteers to help the Nuby, even if they > aren't what Amy called "help vampires". If we insult enough nubies, maybe they'll go away? (Don't care for the 'help vampire' meme, though I think I understand her point.) More important, it would indeed be a shame for people to miss the annual RubyConf simply because of bad timing when hearing about start of registration. Is that likely? Given that a large portion of interest is in Ruby as Rails, and not Ruby itself, I wonder if the recent Rails cons will have satisfied people who may now be less motivated to attend the Ruby conference(s). > > Certainly the regional conferences will help ... I think between Seattle > and Portland we have enough talent to put one on -- how about Centralia? > :) But the wider issue is, "Is there more demand for Ruby resources than > there is supply?" That's especially a concern when there seems to be an > *endless* supply of Java and Perl and PHP resources, and maybe even > Python and Javascript. > > Anyhow, what do other people here think? I know others have been discussing local conferences. One question that has come up is what will draw the best crowd, and what crowd should one be looking to attract. Specifically, turn out for a regional Ruby conference vs. a regional Rails conference. When one talks of Ruby resources and nuby demand, is the demand for Ruby programming knowledge or Rails API support? (I know, this is a simplification, but I think it focuses the main idea.) I'd hate to find that I can't attend the Denver gathering because I got to the Web site too late (though my army of tireless robots shall be unleashed momentarily!!!) and I have to believe many others feel the same way. And I'd hate to see the event become "exclusive" or viewed as such (despite knowing that David, Chad, Rich, et al would never intend such a thing). On the other hand, I like the idea of smaller assemblies. There are notable differences in gatherings of 12, 25, 55, 240, and 500, and I can appreciate David's interest in capping registration. Perhaps, if avoiding the enterprisy-ness of multi-track, 500+ attendee conferences is a useful goal, then there should not be just the One, True RubyConf, but several regional ones, across the globe. Perhaps that's more agilely. Or it may be non-issue if people have a choice between Rails and Ruby conferences; RubyConf may go back to ~50 people who all know each other. -- James Britt "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing." - A. Perlis