From: John Labovitz <johnl@...>
Date: 2006-07-28T14:41:17+09:00
Subject: Re: About last night ...

As one of the FOSCON organizers, I'll chime in here.

I love the idea of regional conferences, organized according to the  
philosophy of the groups who are doing the organizing.  RubyConf is  
unique in its one-track, three-day format, but it has obvious scaling  
issues.  And when that's known as the one conference you can't miss,  
the feeling of unintentional exclusivity arises.

FOSCON has taken two tacks thus far: last year we approached people  
who were speaking at OSCON and invited them to give a "preview" of  
their talk at FOSCON.  This year the FOSCON planners sat down and  
made up a list of who we thought were influential and important  
people in the Ruby community, and invited them to speak about  
whatever they liked.  There was no jurying or selection, beyond the  
initial voting of which of the six people we were going to contact.   
We also encouraged the 20-minute lightning talk format to keep things  
interesting, given that we had basically a three-hour period to have  
our micro-conference.

Like Pat mentioned, events like Linuxfest Northwest are an alternate  
method of putting together Ruby conferences, without having to do  
*all* the hard work of finding a venue, dealing with registration,  
etc.  I'm sure there are many similar conferences that could have a  
Ruby presence.  For FOSCON, we had an existing relationship with Free  
Geek (we have our monthly meetings there), and they were kind enough  
to give us the space for free.  Maybe there are similar nonprofits  
that can help with the gritty logistical issues.

--John