Independent Tech: Dave Thomas on GOTO Conferences, Vendor Influence, and Community Values

So, quite a few years ago in Denmark, a small company, Trifork, couldn't afford to send all their really talented people to the top U. S. conferences. So, when they started, of course, all five of them went, but now it's a couple of hundred. Yeah, it's cheaper to have your own conference. They basically decided to have their own conference, and they realized that this was actually pretty expensive. And so, they said, 'Well, maybe we can share that with the community in Aarhus in Denmark,' which is a fairly small town, actually. For the last 15 years, what used to be called the JAOO conference was born. I got involved with them about seven years ago—I did a keynote, and that turned into a relationship.

No, I didn't! The big thing we liked about the conference is that it has a completely independent program committee, so the vendors can't screw with the content. In that sense, it's raw tech, wants to have the best speakers, and a very simple system for voting. Some people might have been to QCon, which is part of the series run by GOTO Conferences, as well as the YOW! conference in Australia, which I actually run. I think it's really interesting that you're working to avoid sponsorship entanglements—and I use that word purposely. Yeah, so the first time we do the conference in an area, the large traditional sponsors typically go, 'Hey, what do you mean you don't want Billy Bob? ' Yeah, exactly. 'We have this product, our chief evangelist wants to do that. ' So it's usually kind of a rough time the first time out. But then they find out that the developers really vote with their feet. The idea behind the whole conference series is basically just to have great speakers that you typically wouldn't get in your community. Not that every community doesn't have great speakers—Chicago's not too shabby. No, you've got lots, and many are good friends of mine. But the idea is to make it a unique event so people can actually see the speakers and interact and network in their community. We now run it in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Aarhus, SKU Con in London, San Francisco, Seattle, Australia, and this year in Prague. If everything goes well, we'll be here in Chicago in 2013. We're just here looking at venues and looking to kick off with our first GOTO night. What we try and do is work with the user groups to see what speakers they want. The key thing is to complement. The user groups are really the people that drive things in the community. Do you go with the user groups because they tend to be the people that are more out there, engaging with technology and seeking information?

They're the people who are the advocates. They typically have a lot of the brighter people. They're the ones figuring out whether you should be using Ember. js or why you're using that old Backbone stuff. In internet minutes, they're really on top of it. The other thing is they're networkers.