Re: On future conferences

jim@nasby.net (Jim Nasby) writes:
> On Sep 25, 2006, at 5:39 AM, Robert Bernier wrote:
>> On Sunday 24 September 2006 20:32, Jim Nasby wrote:
>>>> Thus, one in Japan, one in central Canada, perhaps one in the
>>>> western US, perhaps one or more in Europe and elsewhere, with the
>>>> assumption of rather less heavy travel being involved than was
>>>> the case for the "Anniversary" conference.
>>>
>>> One thing to consider is that such a format might make it more
>>> difficult to get adequate sponsorship, since presumably it would
>>> cost more to host a number of small conferences rather than one
>>> large one.  Likely sponsors would probably have to lay out more
>>> money outside of the sponsorships as well, since they'd likely
>>> want to attend multiple conferences.
>>
>> I don't think it's as big an issue as it might be. Look at Linux
>> World, they have multiple shows running throughout the world and
>> not just in the US.
>
> And they have people willing to pay a lot of money both to attend
> and to have booths. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but if
> it wasn't for the financial support of all the corporate sponsors,
> the anniversary summit simply wouldn't have happened.

It may be that the EnterpriseDB and GreenPlums of the community need
to pick and choose which conferences to sponsor by their presence.

But in view that there are a lot of trade conferences out there with
"Linux" in their names, some of which attract such companies, others
that don't, that's clearly already the case.

> Hopefully at some point there will be enough commercial interest
> around PostgreSQL that such sponsorship won't be required, but I
> don't think we're there yet.

I don't think that's self-evident.

The fact that there was some corporate sponsorship made certain parts
of the Anniversary conference easier; in particular, finding a place
to hold the "code sprint" would have been a lot more challenging
without that.  "More challenging" is by no means synonymous with
"impossible."

The economics of having a set of regional conferences changes most
pointedly in that there is no longer the need to raise *nearly* as
much money to cover travel expenses.  If you're not spending $3000 USD
on travel, that leaves a lot of money left over on the part of
attendees to possibly even pay a bit more up front for a conference
fee.

It would be interesting to know what the aggregate travel budget for
the Anniversary conference was (that is, what was spent by everyone on
travel); I rather suspect that this amount exceeded the corporate
sponsorships by a pretty hefty margin.
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