Dave Thomas on GOTO Conference Leadership and Community Building | GOTO 2015

But I'm here with Dave Thomas, who has helped bring GOTO Conference to Chicago and with it all the other events that are around GOTO Conference.

It really helps to broaden the perspective and bring in new ideas. Well, and one of the things I like about GOTO Conference, and I was talking with people out on the floor is, when I go to a RubyConf, I kind of know everybody who's there. If I go to a . NetConf, I kind of know everybody who's there, and everybody kind of knows who the speakers are, but when you come to a GOTO Conference, there's people that are kind of blow your brains out of the back of your head, but you might not know them because they're not necessarily in whatever sub-community usually gets represented. Well, I think that's really the mission we have is really to try and bring, to try and make people aware of great people and great developments in the industry, and our PCE works very hard to try and find new speakers, try and track different trends, and we have a pretty high turnover ratio with speakers, and we actually have a rule that we won't ever have a speaker speak in one city three times in a row. Oh, okay. So we try and, we try and involve people covering a broad variety of topics, so really, thanks to our international PC who are constantly digging out speakers. And we also try and bring on people that aren't well known, which is a bit of a problem. And that's one of the reasons we have this sort of long introduction in the morning is that, you know, often people, they know about the brand, right, so-and-so who wrote the 20 books and is very popular and so on, and that's always great to have them. But we often have some real up-and-comers or Some people that have done some really unique work, and we try and feature them as well. And I think people, I think that's one of the people's things. People come in and they say, 'Oh, I'm going to go to this talk,' and all of a sudden they hear about this and they say, 'Oh, you know, there's really two of us here from the company. I think I'll go to the other one,' and then they're both going to the talk that they didn't plan on going to. So, if that works, then I think it's a good idea. It's a little bit of serendipity, you know. And, I mean, and just seeing some of the credentials for some of the speakers, I mean, seeing JPL, seeing NASA in the names of, you know, the credentials for some of the speakers is kind of mind-blowing. I'm going to go hear somebody actually put stuff in space, but then you can also turn around and go learn about JavaScript and how they do the best techniques with JavaScript. It's a really broad spectrum. Yeah, I agree. It's great to have a mix of topics and speakers. It's not just about deepening your skills in a specific area, but also about broadening your knowledge and learning new things. Well, I think one of the things that, you know, I mean, focus conferences are really valuable, incredibly valuable. You go to your language conference or your platform conference, and they're really, really, really good because of that you go deep in your particular set of skills. But, you know, in a world that's changing, breadth and depth are important. So, we try and go long in some of the other areas that other people want. I mean, we were pimping functional programming a long time ago with a lot of people staring at us very strangely.

This stuff is actually in use. ' So, we try and find people that cross over. And so, the people come and go, 'Oh, wow. You know, I've actually learned something new and different. Yeah. And maybe I'll go to that other user group for a change instead of the one I go to every month. ' Yeah, exactly.