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This’ll make more sense after the keynote ;)
Adobe’s Community Summit – Bravo
I went to Adobe’s Community Summit Conference this week. It’s a sub-150 person conference and it is great. Small conferences have so much to offer that bigger conferences do not.
- We had a who’s who list of Adobe giving presos. Think of any big name folks, including the CTO and COO, and they were there. The room was just big enough to need a mic, but small enough that the speaker’s facial expressions were still visible from the back.
- Fun engaging events. With this small group, we were able to have two great events. One was in a small room at Adobe. The second was in a private room of a bowling alley. You’d think geeks and bowling might not work, but it worked great. I’ll post details on my personal blog.
- Communication. Not only did Adobe employees show up to chat during the conference, they also showed up to the events. At the Monday night event, I chatted it up with the about 10 Adobe employees. Tuesday night, Diverted (a.k.a. Flex Evangelist Ted Patrick) and FerociousT (a.k.a. Flex Product Manager Phil Costa) were bowling with us in our lane! Imagine being able to hang and chat with those 2 for 10 frames of bowling. It was great.
Ed Sullivan, who runs the Adobe User Group Program, put this conference together. He did a stellar job. Mad props to him. Ed has also been instrumental to getting our company, 360Conferences, off the ground. Whenever we had doubts, questions or needed someone to bounce an idea off of, Ed’s been there.
Thanks for the good times and all the help, Ed.
Our Partners
Our partners are important to us. Without them our model of conferences, couldn’t exist. They believe in us, we believe in them.
What’s that mean? In a nutshell, it means that they see the benefit of affordable developer-focused conferences. They see that while our conferences aren’t the massive Java-One type of affairs, our ability to have them more frequently across a range of topics makes up for the smaller volume per conference.
No one can go to MIX, MAX, Comdex, Where 2.0, OSCON, etc. all in a year, it’d be cost prohibitive. But if the conferences were cheaper, it would be easier to attend them all.
That’s our model and that’s where our Partners come in. Without CFDynamics, Eventbrite and EventVue, we’d never be able to produce conferences that cost as little as ours do. Where else can you get high quality speakers and sessions, the best and brightest of the community, for 3 full days, for only $480.00?
The answer is easy, and not rhetorical, ‘nowhere’.
As we go, we’re hoping to partner with more and more companies to bring even better and even more affordable conferences to the community, it’s about time!
So say thanks to these great companies!
Alumni First: Community should become Family
I grew up going to the San Diego Comic Con back in the day. Back then though, it wasn’t the 110K+ attendees it is now. I remember hanging with my pops, walking around saying hi to all the friends he saw once a year, brushing into artists like Sergio Aragonés and Moebius and getting some drawings from them. Yes, brushing into…not waiting in line for who knows how long like you currently have to. It got to the point that even the vendors that I liked, that my dad didn’t such as movie poster/button/toy vendors, began to recognize me even though I was a growing tyke. The thing I remember fondly was that back then the community was more like an extended family.
We want to try to recreate that. There was two reasons why that family feel grew. One was that the event was small back then. We’ve covered that with the future 360 people size limit.
Another thing I seem to recall was early registration. That’s when most of the “family” would register. We’re going to do an interesting twist on that. For our conferences, we’ll help maintain relationships that can grow stronger each year. To do this, we’re implementing the Alumni first registration period. What this is going to be is a set time frame for Alumni to register before the general public has the chance to register. If all 360 reregister for the next version of a given conference, so be it. We want to get to the point where everyone knows everyone and networking time turns into bonding time.
We maybe crazy, but that’s okay. Crazy never hurt anyone. =)
Why we do conferences the "360" way
Tom sent me this post, “Take a look, see if it’s good.” It was.
Adam’s post pretty much explains not just his reasons for going to conferences, but also explains why Tom and I produce them.
And on a related note, what’s with the no-wifi nonsense?! I have Verizon broadband [sic] for my laptop now, but still… ack!
We hear you, Adam. As a conference attendee who has sat in a session trying in vain to lock onto the Access Point, believe me, we hear you. Most conference centers offer wifi, but it’s almost always so completely inadequate that less than half of the attendees can use it. We’re doing everything we can to make sure our events, are not “like other conferences”. In fact, we scratched a few venues off our list because the hotel didn’t have free in-room wifi. That’s how much we’re looking out for you.
Among Adams many other points (all good), he has this to say.
Lastly, seeing someone in person provides a very helpful new perspective on what they’re meaning to communicate online. It’s easy to misread text on a page, especially when there’s no immediate opportunity to follow up with questions. But in person, issues get cleared up on both sides, and that’s good for everyone.
This is what we’re all about. Conferences that are so big you can’t truly meet anyone, suck. It’s really that simple. At 2000+ people, you completely lose the community feel. You can spend 3 or 4 days at a conference and never even see some one you know is there, weak.
For future 360 events, will continue our ‘360′ theme by being small, 360 attendees, small. Sure we could do more (we are for 360|Flex Seattle because we lost our heads for a second), but why? We’ve found that small events, done well, with the attendee in mind, not only create a much more enjoyable experience, but are just better conferences. Aren’t we being elitist? No. Sure, inviting every person we’ve ever met to our respective weddings would have been neat to, but would it have been fun? Nope. Sometimes, you have to fore go growth just for growth’s sake. We hope you all agree.
Someone gets it. Someone really gets it!
I came across this conference today, and was impressed. The C4 conference (from what I can tell) holds to the same ideals we do at 360Conferences. No corporate schilling, just people enthusiastic about a technology (Macs in this case), and about the community around them. On top of that, C4 is small and affordable, only $512.00
Our hats are off to Jon “Wolf” Rentzsch
Welcome Ryan Stewart
After much begging and pleading, John and Tom finally allowed me into the 360|Club. I’ll be joining them to help put on both the 360|Flex Seattle conference as well as other conferences down the road. For me, it’s really exciting. I got to feel the vibe of 360|Flex in San Jose as an attendee, and spend some time with Tom and John which made me really want to be a part of what they’re doing. I think the roaring success of the first 360 Flex was due to the work those guys put in and the general excitement of Flex developers at the conference. After seeing it, becoming part of the team sounded great.
I also think their approach, the smaller, low cost conferences is great. The number of Flex developers gets bigger every day, and with technologies like Apollo on the horizon we can do a lot with 360|Flex and help developers get to know the technology. The Flash/Flex community is a great one to be in, and the speakers we had for San Jose were phenomenal. I’m hoping I can help bring in the same level of speakers for other conferences down the road.
360|Flex Seattle is still a few months away, but I can’t wait to jump in and get people excited about it. I get to show off Seattle to a bunch of developers and help host a fun conference in the process. I’ll still be blogging regularly, and I still have my day job, but 360|Flex is going to be a big focus of my energy. You guys deserve the best, and I’m hoping I can keep up with John and Tom to keep giving that to you. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line or ping me on IM. Viva la 360!
About Us
360Conferences is John Wilker and Tom Ortega, long time friends and longer time web developers.
We started this company with a single core belief:
Great conferences need not be expensive.
It’s that simple; Conferences should not break departmental budgets. A company should be able to send a whole team, not just one member.
What makes us qualified to produce conferences?
We attend plenty, so we know what we like and don’t. More over, we listen to what people say about conferences. We structure ours around what people want, not around what makes the most money for the conference coordinators. (Yes, we realize that’s us.)
How can we be profitable charging such low entrance fees?
There’s being profitable and then there’s making money hand over fist. We believe in the former, we’re not here to make a killing on a single conference or come away from a mediocre conference with tons of money left over. Success for us is a truly great conference that people will remember and that keeps the community buzzing. We’re happy to do that for just enough money to pay ourselves and put some money towards the next conference.
The biggest key to our success is our partners. Eventbrite handles our registrations, fees, and attendee lists. CFDynamics handles our hosting needs (website and mail). EventVue helps our attendees become a community. As we grow, we hope to announce more partners who alleviate the stress and pressures of things we shouldn’t waste our time on. In other words, if a company can handle something better than us, we’ll likely partner with them so they can do what they’re best at and we can focus more time on our customers.
How can anyone be sure we’re not “making a killing” and walking away with “tons of money”?
Easy, we plan to be as transparent as we possibly can. We’ll blog about how much it costs to feed a conference, how much it costs to produce hundreds of badges, etc. We think business as a whole needs a little more honesty. Therefore, we’re starting with our little corner, the conference space.
What about the established “big” conferences?
What about ‘em? They serve a need and a market. We serve another. We aren’t trying to conquer the entire conference space. Quite the contrary, we aim to fill the need for quality conferences at affordable prices. Which ones you prefer is up to you.
Why is our corporate website a blog?
While we are web developers and could make a traditional site, business is a conversation and so we feel our website should be too. If people want to make comments on parts of our corporate site, they should be able to and we should converse with them. Let’s face it: We’re here to serve you and if we ain’t got the time to listen and chat, then we shouldn’t be in business.
The Start of Something great!
Big conferences, are going away, and we’re here to help them out the door.