GOTO Conference and Community w/Dave Thomas

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m sitting here with Dave Thomas with the GoTo conferences and user group series. He’s here in Chicago to do some scouting. I can’t say any more. But we wanted to take a moment and give Dave a chance to talk about the GoTo group and what exactly you guys are looking to do. What are conspiracies? Yeah, what is the great conspiracy, the GoTo? So, quite a few years ago in Denmark, a small company, Tripork, couldn’t afford to send all their really talented people to the U.S., to the top U.S. conferences. So, when they started, of course, all five of them blew, but now it’s a couple of hundred. Yeah, it’s cheaper to have your own conference. So, 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… The community in Aarhus in Denmark, which is a fairly small town, actually. And so, for the last 15 years, what used to be called the YOW conference, or J-A-O-O is the way we would say it, was born. And I got involved with them about seven years ago. I did a keynote, and that turned into a… Did you know you were going to get married to the conference? No, I didn’t. The big thing we liked about the conference is that it has a completely independent program committee, and so the vendors can’t screw with the content, right? Right. In that sense, it’s raw tech, wants to have the best speakers, and a very simple system for voting. Maybe some people have been to a QCon, but basically, because that’s part of the QCon San Francisco, and QCon London are part of the series of conferences run by GoToConferences, as well as the YOW conference in Australia, which I actually run. I think it’s really interesting that you’re working, you’re trying to avoid sponsorship entanglements, and I use the word entanglements a little bit purposely. Yeah, so the first time we tend to do the conference in the area, the large traditional sponsors typically sort of go, “Hey, what do you mean you don’t want Billy Bob?” Yeah, exactly. We have this product. Our chief evangelist probably 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. So basically, 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 has great speakers, certainly lots of great speakers. In Chicago, we’re not too shabby. No, you’ve got lots, and many are good friends of mine. But the idea is to make it kind of a unique event. So that people can actually see the speakers and interact and network in their community. And we now run it in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Denmark, at SKU Con in London, in San Francisco, in Seattle in Australia, and this year in Prague as well. And if everything goes well, we’ll be here in Chicago in 2013. We’re actually just here looking at venues. We’re looking to kick off with our first go-to night. And what we try and do is basically work with the user groups to see what speakers they want to do. The key thing is to complement. The user groups are really the people that don’t drive the things in the community. And so, find out what sort of speakers they want. And given that, we feed that to our PC and they decide. And then we always have to try and get some sponsors to pick up the tab for the speakers. Do you go with the user groups because they tend to be, and this might be kind of a leading question, but they tend to be kind of the people that are more out there and engage with technology and seeking more information? Exactly. They’re the people who are the advocates. And they typically have a lot of the brighter people. They’re the ones that are figuring out whether you should be using EmberJS. Why are you using that old backbone stuff? In internet minutes. So, they’re really on top of it. The other thing is they’re networkers. I appreciate you coming along on short notice and connecting with people. And they really share the values. The other thing is they tend to be discerning customers. So, in the end, we’re not really interested in trying to compete with other commercial events. Nor are we interested in competing with user group events. So, in general, if there’s a user group event that we can help amplify that or push it, or we can take a local speaker and push them out to one of our conferences in another city, anything like that that really works to complement it. And that was an interesting thing. It looks like you go into an area and you start up a group. But in order to stay sponsor-free, you charge a fee to come to the group. I had always assumed groups were free. But I learned that there’s actually a large number of groups that charge money for membership. Like a dues more than actually like a fee. What we do is go to nights really just to bring one of our speakers in and do that. And we charge, I think in Chicago, we charge $5. And the really only reason for doing that is that we found it to be kind of impossible to control the numbers. So, if you’re trying to get a venue and things like that. The other thing is that, you know, if you talk to any of our Australian users, they tell you, you know, I’ve always gotten $35 worth of beer and pizza for my $5. So, I do know there’s a religion among user groups. And we just decide that for our point of view, we really can’t manage the venue or the space in terms of how many people are coming and so on. And typically, if you ask people for something, then you can kind of give you the head count numbers and things like that. But it’s not, it’s really not intended to be an obstacle. And we don’t have a sort of membership thing. We don’t really spam people, really. It’s just a, we really do one event a year in a city. It’s a conference. And we have no other, there’s no other interest. The group doesn’t really exist. So, typically, what we’re trying to do is we do a go-to night. The first one we’re doing, we’re having Justin Shee, who’s the CTO of Basho. He’s the key designer of React, an OSQL database. So, he’s going to be coming here. And we’ll, you know, Martin Logan and the Erlang user group. And we’re hoping they’ll all be out supporting. But we’re typically, what we’re trying to do is, you know, meet with user groups and say, look, you know, if you’ve got a speaker you’d like, we might be able to get for you. And we’ll try and maybe put it together. We say, okay, maybe we can get the Ruby and the JavaScript guys together because occasionally they do the same thing. And say, okay, here’s a speaker or two that we could bring together and we could do a go-to night around that. And we would pick up the cost for the speaker and the event and things like that. So, that’s really the idea. That’s really interesting. Well, I really do hope to see May 2013, a go-to conference, to be able to come out and participate in that. But, again, you know, thank you very much for taking the time to meet with me. Thank you very much, Michael. It’s been great. And we’re very pleased with the reaction in the Chicago community. We actually started doing this. I was doing a lot of work here in Chicago in 2009. And we talked into this then. But, you know, we got off doing some other things. But I think we’re back now. We’re back now. Well, that’s good news. All right, thank you very much.