Access, Diversity, World-Class Content & Value

If you’ve attended one of our events before you’ve probably noticed certain principles are extremely important to us. If you haven’t, they will quickly become evident. While you might not agree with everything or anything for that matter, we’re ok with it. It’s who we are.

1 • Access Matters

While there is nothing wrong with making money, we choose to price our registration fees in a way that encourages and enables access (as in getting in the door) for the ‘normal’ person. We happen to believe open source, open tech, and the open web are the future, that we’re only at the beginning of this ‘wave’, and that the country and industry need good people with these skills and this expertise. The question for us becomes – how does someone learn new things, meet new people, and see the technologies and thought leaders up-close if opportunities like conferences aren’t accessible? How do people that haven’t traditionally participated in the ‘open’ community meet like-minded friends and future colleagues if they can’t get in the door? The answer is they usually don’t – and that’s a shame. We’re making every effort to change this by keeping costs low and ensuring a welcoming, safe environment featuring world-class content.

We also mean ‘access’ in another way. If you’ve ever attended an event and heard a great speaker, only to see them duck out a side door before you had a chance to meet them or say “hi” you know where we’re going with this. We have, and always will ask our world-class speakers to stick around and hang out with attendees after talks and at socials. This, happy to say, happens a lot. We are amazed by the number of people that regularly tell us “I can’t believe I just talked to x speaker for 15 minutes… I’ve been reading about them for years.” This makes us feel good. This is what it’s all about.

2 • Diversity

We don’t give diversity lip service, and we do everything possible to create it at our events. How do we do this in technology and ‘open’ space? As previously stated, we keep costs low to ensure people just getting started, and those not making six figures, and those not sponsored by a large company, can actually afford to attend. We also create an environment that everyone feels welcomed, appreciated, and secure. We often lead emails, welcome statements, and other communication with our attendance policy, and we make no apologies for it. Our attendees are perhaps at risk of being “thanked to death”, but they better not be disrespected in any way. Finally, we absolutely, and rather fanatically, court diverse groups to attend and participate, and we guarantee you’ll notice this if you attend. We have proudly ‘set the pace’ in this area in a variety of ways, and we will continue to do so – because it’s important.

3 • World-Class Content & Value

Why are “world-class content/speakers” and “accessibility” way too often mutually exclusive? This has never made sense to us, and never will. We are determined to make great content available at a fair cost – and create tremendous value in the process. We want to provide the best content in the world to attendees, then have those same hard-working, motivated attendees contribute back to the community or even become a world-class speaker/thought leader themselves.