hi i'm mike i'm again i'm here at WindyCityRails and i'm uh talking with evan light who runs the ruby d camp or you created the ruby d camp but anyway can you tell me a little bit about ruby d camp and and what you're what you're doing there well first hi because i'm a goofball um okay so yeah d camp i created it i guess in uh 08 for a lot of different reasons i was frustrated with i was sitting in the audience at RailsConf i guess it was in 08 and chad fowler was giving a presentation he was giving his keynote and he made one remark he said i don't do well in classroom environments and so i instantly blocked everything else he was saying after that and thought well i don't really either i don't imagine most of the people here either why are we listening to this yeah and so i just kept thinking about that after that event and i realized well then we've got this whole conference model backwards we shouldn't have one person standing at the front of the room all the time the teacher in front of a teacher in front of a seminar essentially um sometimes we have genuine experts at the front of the room often we just have someone who maybe just learned something you want to share about it so my question is really what makes these people so qualified to stand on the stage and when you reflect on it um and and this is awfully ironic maybe hypocritical i'm talking about the set of conference i'm speaking at right but um the the speakers at conferences are chosen by a very select few individuals the people who run these conferences for any number of reasons not necessarily because of some unique special competence not necessarily um for a reason that necessarily behooves the audience but it behooves those people who are running the conference so maybe better to instead of having a if you will an elitist group or an elite group an exclusive group choose who speaks at events that everyone should come gather together and share what's interesting to them what's important to them and what they want to learn about and then grow together as a group collectively yeah that's a very interesting perspective about the elitist i i have to do this is a strong word i but but but it is it's the um i've i've been guilty of it myself i'll use a different word or a different phrase hero worship yeah well or thinking about who's going to bring people into the conference market and that's that's that was the aspect i was going uh to go at is that i know i've i've sat down and looked and said you know this person is really well known that this person is going to be somebody that people are going to want to see and they're going to bring more audience and make more value for the conference and which is a silly thing especially for a free con well this is a paid conference i can't speak to that but uh doing free events it's you know who who am i serving well decamp wasn't originally free the first year it was more form a little more formal it it had the basic format i described but it was a hundred dollars because we had it at a hotel venue um and that added all kinds of complication and it was chris williams from the javascript community who had participated in the first decamp fighter call actually he sponsored come to think of it um he said why not hold a campground and that just hit me like a gold brick in the side of the head uh it's the word camp well no it's not just the word camp it's just i'm a bit of a tree hugger tree hugging hippie and yes yeah yeah so we did it at a state campground uh manassas was a the i don't see manassas battlefield campground i guess or the battlefield park has a campground um and we only had maybe 12 people who stayed overnight but for those of us who stayed overnight during the camp it was a hell of an experience then i heard about this role playing game group that a few friends of mine participate in and they have a yearly gathering at this cabin camp um and i went and investigated it actually has a cell phone signal surprisingly and i looked at the space and thought this is just magnificent the price is 800 for four nights yeah it has a professional kitchen a walk-in freezer a sleeping room for 78 people right how much more perfect it had plenty of electricity we didn't blow any breakers for two years we haven't blown breakers for two years now yeah how much more perfect could it get it's so cheap yeah and it gets people out of their element and it's just far enough from civilization prince william forest park in virginia it's about maybe 40 miles 30 40 miles outside dc it's hard for people to leave it's just inconvenient enough for people to go home that even the locals tend not to want to so we have three days three and three and a half days or so of people stuck together in the same place yeah and that can be really powerful yeah and also being out in the the greenery is it's got to be enough of destruction of what your typical mental state is inside of a building inside of artificial lighting you know you're you're out and there's green and there's there's the big blue room yeah yeah yeah that's right a comic strip but yeah well yeah yeah the big blue room that there's the great outdoors but it it it sounds like it it kind of breaks um uh routine it breaks um a rigid expectation of how a conference should be and that's what we try to do across the board okay and i do would you do anything with uh uh trying to bring in local user groups or anything like that well uh at first i tried to market if you will i sent emails out to user groups up and down the mid-atlantic um and i because i lived in the metro area i lived in northern virginia most of my life i knew a lot of people in that area so i've talked to them the most in the first few years was mostly local people but i'd always had the intent to try to make it big not necessarily in size but in terms of reach because again i feel like the model the conference model just doesn't seem right especially for a group as diverse as the ruby community i do think that we are somewhat unique and special snowflakes as a community for for better or worse in that i feel like ruby's a very expressive language it tends to attract slightly unusual people um maybe a little bit smarter than the average bear but maybe you could say that about anyone who goes to a conference and or people who are more interested in the average bear people who know more than the average bear if that's the case why are we just lecturing at them right um though i already said that yeah well it's it's it's an interesting perspective is it's knowledge is it's just uh it's it's just it's just knowledge until you put into action and a lot of times you're coming to a conference and we get knowledge but no action but one of the other aspects that um troubling me about the conference environment is a lot of people i found this about myself years ago a lot of people go to the conferences not for the presentations because you see we we were talking about this a moment ago before we rolled camera you see people with laptops open typing away all the time they're not really paying attention so why are they there they're not really there for the presentations they're there for the other people right or what sometimes we call the hallway track so the idea then was well let's make something that's essentially starting as a hallway track and then i had a few other people egg me to go in certain directions i was originally thinking something that was less controlled than a conference but even then i was still holding on just a little to some control i have very very little control you're just setting the stage right now for the event we go so far as to bring supplies which i used to be solely responsible for acquiring them now we have so many people who participate that i'm just making sure people are talking and i might not even have to go fetch anything this year which i usually do um so let me back up really the whole metaphor stone soup everybody keeps or i'll let you tell okay so the story of the story of the soup i guess it started in france during some war or another some soldiers walk into a town and they have nothing to eat at all and the people in the town are very poor but the soldiers say the soldiers come up with this idea of well we're going to get this big pot put some water in it we have this magic stone that will make the food taste really good but if you put a little bit of something else in there it'll make it even better yeah and then so the townspeople started contributing a little bit a little bit a little bit at a time by as individuals the next thing they have this magnificent meal decamp works exactly like that the first year or i guess the second year when we were really in the woods i went to costco loaded up my father's subaru outback because my car can't load as much stuff um bought all the supplies at costco dragged them out there dragged and my father dragged his grill out there um i did a lot of lugging around but but what happened on site is that i would start to do some work and then people would say oh evan's doing this by himself let's help yeah and then before i knew it i could just step back and they would do it yeah and whereas this year we've evolved to the point where occasionally someone would walk up to me and say do you think i should do so and so like do you want to yeah yeah and and sometimes even better someone would just go into the kitchen and just start cooking because they were hungry great yeah yeah i love it i don't want to have to do any of this i shouldn't have to do any of this i try not to be benevolent dictator i want people to just do things together benevolent benevolent facilitator well that's the goal that's the goal and i think i'm i think we as a community are mostly there now and i say community because d camp has a tendency to draw a lot of previous attendees back um i'm not the only one who's very passionate about it i just started that way but i guess you could say i've sold or they've sold each other on the idea that it's not just my idea now it's our idea and so um this year i had people coordinating on what supplies to buy what they are going to cook because we've got some really amazing people when it comes to making food yeah i think about that a little too much but really when you start with your hot dog buns and um some sugar and some other things you have a guy come out with this amazing bread pudding it's hard not to be blown away by the creativity and love that goes into it and that was just emblematic of the whole event last year and that's pretty much what it's like now everything is is a communal effort and usually i don't have to start any of it now they just they know something to get done someone starts doing it other people see them they help so uh i'll say it on a camera now oh my god i don't think i've done this before it's basically a socialist experiment for a few days yeah yeah it's a big yeah it's a big commune no it really is essentially a commune just uh we we drop in the supplies at the beginning occasionally resupply during from a central budget if you will i just break the checks to people okay so i handle so i'm the pollock bureau i i control the checkbook but there really isn't a no unless we don't have money right um because people are very reasonable about their expectations usually collectively and things get done yeah and you know just kind of thinking about um going the conversation also that we had a little bit before uh um just kind of switching gears uh i know that you're also very involved with looking at and you've been vocal about um equality at the conferences and and and seeing a mixed audience of people that it's you know traditionally a white male young uh audience that conferences is that something that uh i'm sure you you have an opinion on and could make a comment on have you seen like a change over the years with with any kind of um attitude towards women and uh people who would otherwise be considered minorities at conferences i i've seen collectively over the whole of the the conferences in the ruby community a trend toward reaching out more RailsBridge was has been around for a few years now that that's a a women's outreach group essentially um i've seen more outreach toward minorities i'm proactively trying to get more minorities involved more women involved it and it's not that i i shoot for a quota but i know worthy people worthy people i know people who are passionate who are interested or and or extremely talented and there are a lot of people like that in the ruby community so we don't have to bring out representative numbers we can skew them just a little bit why not because we're stronger i've always been a very big believer that we're stronger for diversity monoculture is death and so having more women involved is a good thing having more minorities involved is a good thing more perspective more disagreement as long as it's constructive is a good thing okay and uh but i mean what i was what i was what i was trying to get at is is uh is the um uh well i actually can't remember what i was going to do but that's okay because that happens every now and then but thank you very much evan for taking the time you're welcome thanks mike