A
Austin Ziegler
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
