Apologies for the anoraking, but hopefully my regular readers are used to it by now. I have been involved in organising several different technical conferences in the UK, so this is an interesting subject for me.

Dynamic Programming Language conferences are great

I have heard of five conferences in the second half of 2008 connected to Open Source dynamic languages within reach of where I live:

• PyCon UK 2008
• Europython 2008
• TCL/TK Europe 2008
• YAPC (Perl) 2008
• RailsConf Europe 2008

There are probably more that I have not heard of. There are four with very similar prices, and one that is more expensive:

Earliest possible price

Latest possible price (on the door)

Community and corporate conferences

While the type of content is more or less comparable across these conferences, there are of course many differences with the presentation. A community-organised conference emerges through the work of volunteers, mailing lists and fair amount of gaffer tape. A conference organised by a large company has secretaries, marketing officers, paid web designers and professional printed schedules and so on.

In corporately organised conferences, there is a clear line between those on stage and delegates in the pews. The organisers are working for the company, and the speakers will get in free and possibly have their transport and hotel bills covered. This probably accounts for the RailsConf fee.

Community conferences tend to treat everyone the same, a larger proportion of delegates will be pitching in and contributing something. When 50% to 100% of the delegates are conference organisers or speakers then they of course have to cover their own costs.

Delegates are not all the same

I was thinking about these issues while at Europython. Organising a conference for several hundred people is difficult. One of the difficulties is that potential delegates fall into separate groups with different preferences. Let's split them up into four groups:

1. People who use of the particular language/toolkit in their full-time profession.
2. People who work in IT, but the particular language/toolkit is not directly part of their paid-work.
3. People who do not work in IT at all. They may use or want to use the language/toolkit as a hobby, for example, people who by day work in some other job but by night are open source contributors.
4. Students, retired, unemployed.

Attendence

On the whole, for group 4, it does not really matter if the conference is in weekdays or weekends.

Group 1 see the conference as work, so prefer the conference to be in weekdays, so they can miss days at the office and carry on with their normal social activities on the weekend. They would still come at the weekend, they have to meet peers and keep up with the state of the art, but they will moan heavily about missing football or salsa class or whatever.

For group 2, these people find it hard to get their work to let them have time off in the week to attend a weekday conference. A few of these people might be willing to use some of their holiday because the knowledge and contacts gained from the conference may help them in their personal career development. That is pretty difficult for people with families. Economically speaking, holding the conference on weekdays raises the cost of attending for this group by whatever benefit they could have had from two more days of holiday.

On the whole, Group 3 just can't come on the weekdays. They can't get time off, and it does not benefit their careers.

Cost

On the whole, for group 1, price is not a problem for these people because work is covering expenses. This group is not price sensitive, or in economic terms, their demand is price-inelastic. This group is more sensitive to hassle, they are happy to pay a little more if someone else deals with all the mundane organisational matters, food, accommodation etc.

On the other hand, group 4 are not receiving a wage, so are very sensitive to price (their demand is price-elastic). If the conference is too expensive then they cannot come.

Group 2 and 3 are generally not receiving expenses but are receiving a wage. They can afford more than group 4 but will not want to pay for non-essentials because it is their own money they are spending.

Conference planning

So when planning a conference, the choices you make about when you hold your conference (weekend/weekday) and the cost of the conference determines the number of delegates you will get. All other factors (e.g. advertising/publicity) being equal, it approximates to:

number of delegates = group1 + (group2 + group3 / weekday penalty) + (group4 / cost penalty)

You get group1 no matter what, if you hold the conference in a weekday then you only get some proportion of groups 2 and 3, and likewise, the more you charge, the less of group 4 you get.

So you get the maximum number of delegates by holding your conference at a weekend and charging as little as possible. Of course, whether you want the maximum number of delegates is another matter. Charging nothing at all might mean you have the maximum number of delegates, having a rather uncomfortable experience.

If you only care about group 1, then hold the conference all week in a sunny beach resort with expensive food and entertainment, this however can become sterile over time, as professional programmers of one language/toolkit all have the same experience and ideas. Groups 2, 3, and 4 can bring in unique and off the wall ideas and application domains.

Conclusion

I am not here trying to argue for any particular set up, what works for one technical community may not work for another.

However, it is often the case that all the conference organisers will be from the same delegate type. So I think it is worth taking time to think about how the decisions you make enable or disable certain types of delegates from coming to your conference.