360conferences

Diversity in Conferences

I’m kinda torn on the wh0le issue of diversity in conferences. Tech conferences specifically of course.

We strive to make our events appeal to anyone and everyone, women, men, children (no joke) etc. I think the whole debate over there not being enough women in tech and women at conferences is more to do with women just not being in these roles as much. Sucks, sure. I don’t think they’re being held back, held up, or hindered. I’ve met many incredibly awesome women programmers. I’m married to one even.

My thoughts on the debate aside though, Tim O’Reilly posted a great call for Diversity though, which I think certainly can’t hurt the situation.

I’d love to get as many session submissions from women as I do from men, despite that meaning I’d have over 300 submissions to go thru to choose 40 speakers, I’d love to have that problem.

I look forward to the day that women, for whatever reason turn out in greater numbers to tech events. If things like this help, then let’s do it!

I’ll be repasting the actual copy into the 360|Flex, 360|iDev, 360|Mobile sites on a diversity page, just to help spread the gospel :)

Great post on “beginners guide to Attending Conferences”

Neil has a really great article on attending conferences, go check it out. This post is just my thoughts on some of his points.

As a conference organizer (our 36 events, and Ignite and some other stuff I want to do) it’s funny how many people don’t follow these guidelines, that to me (even as a conference attendee) are so obvious.

Many of the points are tenets of what we’ve build 360Conferences around even.

I’m not going to include Neils opinions on these items, give his blog some traffic and read them.

Have business cards – I’m torn here. I HATE business cards. Not the idea, but the execution. I’m trying out DUB (I’m jwilker on DUB BTW), which so far seems like a good option. Poken are an interesting approach too, but they’re a bit large for a keychain fob. Business cards suck, they get washed, you end up with a stack, and unless you’re diligent and make notes on them right away, you often forget the person attached. AND you then have to manually enter them into your address book/CRM. I suggest checking out DUB, or buying a poken, supposedly there’s business poken now, but whatever! I like my Ninja.

Come up with an elevator pitch – Agree. I suck at them, and short of “I plan conferences” I’m always at a loss, but Neil is right, and no one (myself included) wants to stand around for 20 minutes while you explain what you do.

Knowledge is power – It is. We pride ourselves on our events being worthwhile both in the sessions and in the halls. But don’t skip the sessions, we bring our A game in selecting speakers. They’re top notch, awesome people, with crazy knowledge who want to share. It’s worth sitting in and seeing what they’ve got.

Kind of a hedge, but the hallways rock too! You won’t find them empty, ever. Someone is always holding court (usually Sim) helping people with problem code, talking about code, etc. Some one is always working over VPN, etc.

Don’t be a networking whore – If you judge success by the number hands shaken or biz cards collected, you’re doing it wrong. No one will remember you, you won’t remember them, and worst, someone will see what you’re doing, and then no on will want to talk to you. In talking to people it’s all about Quality over quantity. Here’s where I really really agree with Neil. He lists key groups you should try to talk to; speakers of course, your competition, and the organizers of the event.

Talk to the organizers. Not just because we’re lonely, which we sometimes are, but because believe it or not, the good ones know everyone there. I’ve lost count of the times Tom and I have freaked an attendee out, but remembering their name from the last conference they attended, etc. They realize we know them, and smile and say thanks, after the initial shock. We ask how they’ve been, what they’ve been up to etc. We may not remember every name, but we remember every face.

One thing Tom and I do is send an email to attendees, telling them, to come to us if they have a specific goal for the conference, people they really want to meet, groups they’re interested in. Tom and I will either do an email intro, or simply walk that person over to another and introduce them to each other. It means a lot for us to be able to do that.

Don’t eat lunch with your friends – This exact point is why some people don’t speak at our events. We’ve had potential speakers tell us, “Don’t offer food, pay the speakers. We’ll go eat with our friends somewhere” We don’t want that. Maybe it’s the outcast in us, but cliques suck. Sure events allow people to reconnect who might not see each other except at conferences, but don’t be exclusionary, meet new people.  If you just want to be in your private social circle, form a club and have meetings. Conferences are as much about meeting new people as anything else. Plus usually (not always) our food isn’t that bad :)

Walk the floor – We don’t have big expo halls, and hope we never do. 1 we want the sponsors where the attendees are, not in their own room, and 2. We don’t need booth babes, and hawkers, and gimmicks, and don’t think our sponsors do either. A six foot table, monitor and computer seems to work. As an attendee I’ll say I’ve never gone to a booth just because it was pretty or flashy.

But I agree with Neil, not all sponsors are gonna bombard you with salesy crap, the good ones will just chat with you, and if there’s business in there, it’ll work out, but you’ll both be better off for having met, that’s for sure. You never know when you’ll need something someone might have been selling.

Take someone out to dinner – Tom and I don’t do this enough, but we really enjoy it when we do. Lunch or dinner, it’s nice to just enjoy a meal with someone.  Technically we take all attendees out for dinner each night, but dinner is in, and it’s a bit impersonal :)

Tom’s leaving after the next 360|Flex

As you may or may not know, I (Tom Ortega) will be leaving the 360|Conferences business after our next 360|Flex show in March of 2010.  You can read about my personal reasons for leaving here. You can try to replace me over at the 360|Flex blog.  :)

360|Conferences was one of those companies that just “happened”. There was no planning for it.  One day it wasn’t there and the next it was.  In the 3 years since it appeared, we’ve built an internationally recognized brand.  We’ve helped the low-cost conference revolution take place.  We’ve delivered strong value during one of the worst financial times in our lives.  In other words, we’ve done many things we’re proud of.

If you’re a follower of this blog, then you know how much we value transparency.  It’s one of the reasons why we feel the company is so successful.  Therefore, we’d like to tell you what the plan is after 360|Flex in March, but to be honest we’re not sure yet.  While 360|iDev is going down in Denver, John and I will be talking about what the next steps are.  I know I’m leaving, but John is not.  Whether that means selling my stake in the company to him, someone else or a company, I can’t say.

One thing we are sorta contemplating is stronger partnerships and possibly even a merger.  The conference space is tough, especially now.  The more value you can get under one company brand, the better off the shows will be. Shows that offer good value for the price, like 360|Flex and 360|iDev, will continue to grow.  Others will fall by the wayside and likely never return.

Another idea we’re tossing around is one that has me shedding conference planning duties.  Under that model, John takes over the biz’s time consuming duties: planning and setting up the events.  I spend most of my time working on my passions and become more of a spokesperson.  Mordy and Barry of MogoMedia seem to have a similar model, only I’m no Mordy.  I’d have to work quite a bit to build that type of reputation for myself.

I always tell people that by 2013, 360|Conferences is poised to be a hugely profitable company.  When the economy starts to pick up and ePublishing finally takes off, this company will be in a great position to reap the benefits of the years of hard work we put in.  Until then though, it’s going to take a lot of time and effort.  If I stuck around I’d be short-changing our customers, because my heart would be elsewhere.

360|Conferences is not the kind of company you can run while your heart is somewhere else.  It’s the kind of company that deserves love and devotion.  It’s the kind of company where you have to wake up in the morning knowing it’s your passion.

While it’s tough having to say goodbye to something that’s been a constant in my life for the past 3 years, I know it’s in good hands.  I’ll be around somewhat until March, so you’ll have to put up with a few more blog posts yet.  After John and I chat in Denver, we’ll post an update here letting you all know what we plan.  We’ll expect you to voice your feedback.  Like always, we’ll take it to heart and try to add that to our thought process.

Now, that being said, hurry up and go register for 360|Flex.  San Jose always sells out, and everyone loves a Farewell Tour!  LOL

Trying new things!

One odd thing about running conferences is that it’s hard to iterate. We’ve treated each event as a learning process, taking the good and bad, learning and then making the next event better. The only problem is the ‘next event’ is 6 months or more away.

Not only is it hard to remember what we need to remember sometimes, but it’s hard for our customers to remember, or worse, they remember the bad more than the good, and have to hope in 6+ months we’ve gotten better.

We also like to try new things, which is also hard for many of the same reasons. If something doesn’t work or needs improvement we’ve got to wait a while before the next iteration. Its not like software where the next version is only so far away as it takes to write it.

That’s probably one of the hardest things for us, we come up with an awesome idea, but it’s either too late to implement, or post event entirely. Some things work, our USB dead drop at WWDC, was awesome, and it led to a registration, which makes it worth it! Some stuff doesn’t work, Flex/Flash camps. Operating within bounds that aren’t conducive to making money is tough, We’ve got nothing against flashcamps, but they’re useless as a money making endeavor, because of Adobe’s rules, for organizing them.

Joint efforts with big companies don’t work either, we learned that the hard way.

So what’s next?

Cruises! Yeah like on a boat. The concept is actually not new at all, the Mac Geek Cruise has been around quite a while and attracts some pretty big names. Our first cruise we’re starting small, see how it works, if we can make some money, even break even really. It’s an adventure, and we don’t know where it will go, but we’ll see.

Join us, we’ve got some awesome (big) names lined up for the cruise, and I mean really it’s a cruise!

It’s a busy Summer!

We realized there wasn’t any single place to point people to our roster of conferences this summer.

These are in order:

• InsideMobile – july 26-27. San Jose CA.
• InsideRIA – August 23-24. San Jose CA.
• 360|iDev – September 27-30. Denver CO.
• 360|MAX – October 4-7. Los Angeles CA.
• RIAdventure360 – December 6-13. New Orleans (Departing)

Clearly we’re busy :) It’s a good busy though, we’re trying new things; the first two events are partnerships with O’Reilly Media, we’re going back to Adobe MAX, and we’re even taking to the high seas!

3 Things to make conferences better, according to Harvard Biz Review

I’ve had this article open in a tab since, well it was published. I’ve been wanting to comment on it, since I don’t think it’s 100% right. YOu can read the entire thing at the HBR site, but I’ll paste the main points

1. Conferences and meetings should tell unique stories.

True, sorta. While we definitely don’t fit the writer’s model of how conferences are created, we still make a lot of decisions ourselves. We look at conferences as “what will people take away” not “What will they get”. Sure they’ll get Chotchkies, and whatever else our sponsors want to provide. But they’ll take away, more knowledge than they can even imagine gor the price they paid to get in the door. They’ll take away connections that lead to new work, new hires, new open source projects, new companies, etc. So while you can make your conference tell a story, I think the value is the event, not the story,whatever that is. The people, the connections, that’s where the value is.

2. Conferences should be for, by, and about the attendees.

i agree completely! We often mock events that have “steering committees” because if the organizer knew their audience, their community, they wouldn’t need a committee to help them select content. They wouldn’t have to ask publicly “Who’s the big name in the industry?” They’d know. If they didn’t know they’d know who to ask, and know how to find them. And that’s for speakers, it would be one thing if it was a keynote or special one off type thing, but not even knowing enough about the community to find speakers? Well that’s not us.

Tom and I call our events, for and by developers, because that’s where our roots lie. Tom still writes code for a living, and I write it from time to time when we need something simple done, we manage our own websites, and SQL DBs, etc. There’s no “Team” supporting us. We think this gives us not only an insight into developers needs and wants, but also allows us to relate.

3. Conferences should be about more than just eating and sitting

While eating is definitely high on Tom’s list of priorities, we do agree that sitting in sessions, and sitting at lunch, are not the most important parts of a conference. More often than not, our lunch setups don’t include seating, we’d rather people have to find a seat in the crowd, just sit down somewhere next to other people. Banquet rounds have a countering effect to that usually. Sometimes it can’t be helped, when the venue has a “Lunch area” that you just can’t avoid.

At night we throw a party (sponsor supported), rather than have a half dozen seperate parties, or no parties, we throw one, one that everyone is welcome to attend, one that has food and drinks, Rock Band and conversation. We sometimes have BOF sessions, and sometimes people go off into the break out rooms to plan, write code, and talk quietly. The bottom line though is we’re all together, there’s no need for small cliques to go off on their own (very un-community) for lunch or dinner, when we’d rather everyone hang out and talk. It’s amazing to see people move from group to group having incredibly cool conversations at every stop.

So yeah there’s always room for improvement, and Tom and I endeavor to learn all the time, so each event is a learning experience, but lumping all conferences together, kinda sucks for the Indies in the crowd. I mean, web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, CFUnited, WWDC, Adobe MAX, are not even in the same park as us, and we like it that way.

Tips for Event Planning for Developers

We don’t want to sound cocky, but there’s no way for us to write this without it.  Therefore, call us cocky, but really, how hard is it to throw a developer event?

People constantly tell us how our shows rock.  We give credit to speakers (they do most of the talking) and sponsors (they do a lot of the paying), but there is something about our shows that people just like.  It’s the community, it’s the feel, it’s the vibe.

We think the main reason why we’re successful is that we know what developers like.  It’s not because we interview them extensively, but rather because we are/were developers.  Like Todd McFarlane said, “I just make what I like and I figure other people are like me and enjoy the same things.”  I’m paraphrasing there, but not much.

If you’ve been tasked with putting on something for developers, here’s some tips to help make it a success. Note: We don’t follow all these rules at our shows because, well, because rules are meant to be broken once you learn them, but you’re likely just learning so stick to the list, okay?  :)

1) Giveways: T-shirts are a must, product (i.e. hardware/software) will get you brownie points.  Developers love two things: t-shirts and product.  In their dream world, they’d never pay for either.  Both however are required for their lives to be fulfilled. You may ask, “Do developers need another shirt?”  Just look around.  What do you see?  Tshirts…lots of them.  Some are very worn out due to the amount of use they’ve gotten.  This *despite* the fact that they probably have 30 others in their closet.  The point is to try to become that worn out shirt.  You want these developers to pimp your product for as long as they live right? Make and give a great shirt, and you’ll more than make your money back in free advertisement.

2) Toys: Developers are really just kids at heart.  They’ve never stopped playing with LEGOs.  Only now, instead of linking plastic bricks, they’re linking lists and classes, etc.  If you’re having an event for a product, you better make darn sure the product is there.  If Prince (Yeah, the singer) throws a party, you expect Prince to sing at the party.  When Sting got married, even though the Police were already broken up, they got together to play for the reception.  Why?  Because there’s just certain expectations you must live up to, or people will be mad and feel cheated.  If you don’t give away any product, but at least have some to play with, you’ll escape the wrath of developers; though you will likely get many, “Are you sure you can’t part with just this one?”.  If you don’t even have some product to play with, then really to be blunt: your event is worthless.  Developers can read and read they do: blogs, tweets, reviews, etc.  If you don’t give them tactile gratification of your product, your event is pretty much a waste of time minus the free meal (see below).

3) Presentations: This one’s a toughy.  If you’re going to have presos, make sure it’s clear and that the alcohol is far from the presos.  DO NOT expect a crowd of 500 to quiet down when you “Shush” them after they’ve been drinking and chatting for an hour.  Place chairs in a room to signify “This is for watching quietly”.  No chairs equals rock concert and sadly, very few people (except maybe Steve Jobs) can command rock star status at a developer event.  Therefore, people will just keep mingling and will ignore the presenter(s). There’s nothing wrong with having presentations, just make sure you prep the crowd and set expectations.  Having your presenters yell over the microphone to *try* to get people’s attention is just annoying to the attendees and the speaker both.

3A) Name it correctly: This goes with #3.  If you call something a “camp” or “conference” or “presentation”, people will know to expect a speaker with a screen spouting off some diatribe.  If you call it a “party”, people expect lots of free drinks and no strings attached (i.e. NO presentations).  Think about it.  In real life, if you went to a “party” where a friend (or group of friends) were giving a presentation, you’d be like, “This is whack, I’m outta here.” Same thing with developer events.  There’s nothing wrong with doing both.  Just be clear on your invite: “Presos and Info @ 6, Party @ 8″.  Just like a wedding, “Ceremony at 1, reception at 4″  Aunt Bessie can come to the ceremony and leave before Drunk Cousin Larry shows up.  There’s nothing wrong with presenting as some people prefer it to the parties, but let people know what’s up.

4) Free food and beverages: This one should go without saying, but we’ll throw it in, just in case.  This should go for every event/party you throw, for personal or professional reasons.  If you are inviting people to gather somewhere, have the decency to feed them and quench their thirst.  Developers like beer (and root beer floats as we’re finding out), so beer will likely be a requirement.  However, try to feed them too, especially if your event crosses into meal times (lunch, dinner).  You don’t even have to get fancy, pizza will do.  However, nicer pizza again gives you brownie points!

That’s it from us.  If you think we missed anything, drop a comment and we’ll amend the list if we agree. :)

It’s gonna be a busy summer!

Tom and I first met Steve Weiss at 360|Flex San Jose ‘07 (Yeah the very first one) and we hit it off immediately. Steve’s an awesome guy so it wasn’t hard for us to like him.

We talked at length about our thoughts on conferences, our approach, our goals, etc.

The friendship continued through the last few years, Steve coming to the events he could so we could chat in person, otherwise email was our medium. Back before InsideRIA launched Tom and I were actually in talks to run it, which was were pretty excited about. Things didn’t work out (as they do sometimes in business) and we all continued to chat.

Around the time InsideRIA was getting off the ground, the idea of an RIA conference was born. Something that wasn’t Adobe specific like 360|Flex, that brought as many of the competing(?) RIA platforms together to network, share war stories, share approaches to problems etc.

That talk continued on and off for months, until now :)

We’re happy to announce our partnership with our pals at O’Reilly! InsideRIA and InsideMobile are our first (of many?) collaborative efforts. Each will be a 2 day event, in San Jose CA. We’ll bring the same cool “John and Tom” vibe, and O’Reilly will bring their awesome reach and connections in the multiple communities. A match made in heaven. I can’t wait to meet everyone that comes to these events! The Call for papers are open for both events, so fire off an idea.

Tom and I also announced recently that the second 360|iDev was in the works for September. In Denver (my home town)! It’s gonna be a fun time, in a fun city!

The last part of the busy is that Steves boss, Joe was very interested in 360|Whispering, our fledgling eBook publishing service. There might be something there! I’m excited, we’ve got a few authors already signed on, so content should be showing up soon, especially an awesome ‘Tech Novella’ (Tom’s term) on Android development from Faisal Abid.

The 4 W’s

I’m quickly becoming a fan of the small Biz Bee blog. This post was especially worth addressing here, since for many the answers might surprise or at least lead to “Ah, that makes sense”. So here are our 4 W’s.

1. Who are you?

Tom and John, for short. We (maybe more me, than Tom) went through a phase of trying to really make 360|Conferences its own identity, separated from its founders. We thought it made sense for the company itself to have an identity, but in the end, we were wrong. We couldn’t make people recognize the company, and we realized the “Tom and John” brand was firmly established, and strong. So to most people, and businesses, 360|Conferences is something that’s on checks, and letterhead, and the company is “John and Tom”.

[Tom here: The one thing I found interesting during that time was size perception of the company.  When we pushed 360Conferences as an entity/identity, people assumed that meant we had an army (or at least one or two helping hands) back at the office.  Which simply wasn't true.  It was weird to see that when you push a brand name as a company, people assume that means it's no longer just the founders.]

That’s only part of ‘who’ though. The rest is that as a company Tom and I strive to break a lot of existing models. We found the conference business to be broken, so we’ve set out to show that an event with high ROI doesn’t have to cost over $1,000 or more. We’re close to proving that not only is it possible to do, but it’s possible to do so and still be profitable enough to do it full time.

Our core values (to me) are building community, getting people together to talk and learn from one another. We love to shake each attendees hand when they pick up their badge, we love to say high and walk the room during lunch, and hold raffles. Our core values are community.

2. What do you do?

This one has confused many of our customers and rightly so I’m afraid. We’ve been confusing on the topic to ourselves, and if we’re not clear how can anyone else be.

We organize conferences. Conferences around communities that we are interested and/or involved in. Communities that are just getting big enough for an event to bring them all together.

More generally we bring people together. 360|Conferences bring them together in real time to meet face to face for a few days at a time. 360|Whisperings is brings them together in delayed time via inexpensive articles that satisfy a specific knowledge.

3. Why does it matter?

Our company and offerings help make a community stronger. We believe the strength of a community directly impacts the strength of the product or services that community exists around. By breaking down the walls that separate community, we increase the throughput on ideas and collaboration. Our events have been the launch pads for books, open source initiatives, jobs and business.

4. What makes you different?

This is a big one, obviously. Any company that can’t answer this well should probably start looking at new ventures. Here’s why we’re different. We care. Conferences aren’t a marketing expense for our company or product. We’re not trying to sell our services disguised as a conference. We don’t have “people”. We don’t hire temps to work registration. We don’t hide until it’s keynote time.  We don’t look at our customers as a necessary evil.

If you come to one of our events, the person handing you a badge is either Tom, his wife Alison, myself, my wife Nicole, or a close friend that volunteered to help us out. We eat our lunch with everyone else. We man the reg desk all day, every day of the event: directing attendees, answering questions, chatting with people and plain just getting to know our customers. If you don’t see us, we’re either putting out a fire or going to the bathroom (Hey nature calls sometimes, you should see the soda I put away at a conference).

Sure we like profit, sure our goal is to make 360|Conferences a paying gig for us, but the company started as a one off $100 event, to bring together the Flex developer community because the other event options all sucked (and still do).

So that’s the “360|Conferences, 4 W’s as interpreted by John Wilker”.

Core Competency is Important

Tom and I have had this talk many a time, I’ve mentioned it on my blog as well. Core Competency is important. Too many people over look it and branch out in ways that make little to no sense and only hurt themselves and their customers/product.

Today’s example, Facebook. ReadWriteWeb has an interesting article on Facebook suffering Twitter Envy.

Facebook is doing quite well as far as I can tell. I’m a casual user, keeping my info up to date, creating events and such for my work efforts, but it’s not open in a tab in Firefox all day. Heck, my mom is on Facebook, it doesn’t get much more mainstream than that!

But facebook is drinking it’s own kool-aid and rather than watch Twitter, see what it’s doing, and see where the complimentary connections are, good ol’ FB wants to take Twitter on. Why? Who knows? Twitter is microblogging, instant chatter, and often noise. So why would FB want to compete with that?

My guess is the same reason FB has been adding features for the sake of adding features, because they can and have nothing better to do all day. Beacon, tabs, new look, apps, who cares? Sure I can give my friends plants, and poke people and junk, but I don’t do any of that. That’s all noise for what FB is about; posting updates and photos for my friends to see.

Whether Twitter “gets it” or is just too busy keeping the servers up to think up new things, they’ve kept Twitter exactly as it was (more or less) when it launched. 140 characters to tell whomever is listening, what you’re doing, reading, eating, thinking. There’s no apps platform (short of an API), there’s no pokes, green patches, fan pages, or events. There’s no ad network. It’s exactly what all of us signed up for.

Too many businesses seem to feel the need to expand and compete where it doesn’t make sense. Stick with what you’re good at, that’s really what matters, and the markets and such will follow.

Sooooooooooo All that said, to bring it back around to 360|Conferences, Tom and I while we might like to own a hotel chain that is specifically designed around conferences, and while we might like to form a car company, etc. We stick with what we know, and that’s helping bring people together. In person at Conferences or now, through eBooks that make purchases reasonable.We’ve thought about expanding to Sony PlayStation game dev events, thought about an event for event planners, but events for the sake of events, isn’t our thing. Events to bring a community together to learn from and interact with each other, that’s our ‘thing’