From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2006-08-08T10:45:39+09:00 Subject: Re: Not a joke RUBY For The Rest Of Us Conference 2006 ROUC On 8/6/06, Gus S Calabrese wrote: > RUBY ROUC is not a joke Gus, I understand what you're wanting to do. The way that you've approached this, however, does have some people wondering about the ability to follow through. The language is "Ruby," as you've noted, so the title of the conference should be: Ruby for the Rest of Us Conference 2006 which would still leave RUBY ROUC as a semi-valid short name. I don't fault your enthusiasm, but I think that you underestimate how much planning goes into a successful conference, and little has been done to counteract the slapdash feel to this. I don't know what the budget and planning for the first Slamdance festival was, but I suspect that it was planned a little more carefully than this appears to be planned so far. So why don't you calm down, take a breath, and then rewrite the pages surrounding the ROUC. Stop including unnecessary personal references and attacks on people who are *extremely well regarded* in the Ruby community. Attacks on them, when they've been extremely calm in pointing out that the use of "RUBY" isn't appropriate when referring to the language will win you no friends. A conference can be low-budget and still be successful without appearing slapdash. You may like having the humour, but I would plan a little more carefully before making the grand announcements that you've made. Otherwise, your first conference may be your last conference as well, because people will talk about how well the conference was managed. Badly managed conferences don't last. Best of luck to hosting a "Rest of Us..." conference; you might even want to look at the unconference[1] model for what you're wanting to do. For that, though, a theatre presentation model definitely won't work. I almost certainly guarantee that people will want Internet access during the conference, and that people will want time and space to chat during sessions that they're not interested in. Are you ready for that? -austin [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/ * austin@halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ * austin@zieglers.ca