The Art of a Balanced Conference

There has been a lot of talk about the current state of conferences, specially iOS conferences. Pedro Pinera wrote an excellent post, where he challenged the diversity and the content discussed at the conferences.

Let me first admit that I have never organized a conference and I don’t think I ever will. Not because it is a waste of time but because organizing a conference is fucking hard. I can’t even organize a poker game with 3 of my friends, who lives down the street, let alone organizing a conference of 50–100 people.

However, I do have a lot of experience in speaking at conferences. I have been speaking professionality for more than a decade and yes I do admit I am fucking awesome at it too. Here are some of the conferences where I have presented:

1. 360iDev
2. 360iDevMini
3. IndieDevStock
4. NSCoderMexico (January 2017)
5. Houston Tech Fest
6. HP
7. North Houston .NET User Group
8. Houston iPhone Meetup
9. Interactive and Marketing Conference

I 100% believe that the benefit of a conference is directly proportional to your involvement during the conference. If you are at the conference and sitting by yourself then you are certainly not going to get any value out of it. I don’t think I am a social Moth (Social Butterfly sounds weird) but I really love talking to people. I talk about technology, family, relationships, future, culture everything and anything. I love to see what people are working on and how they are solving different problems. So, at your next conference just start the conversation with the person sitting next to you.

Diversity

Let’s first talk about diversity! Diversity comes in two different flavors, gender and race. We all know that women only make up a very small portion of the tech community and I believe that a community as a whole will be a better if we have more women developers. I believe women bring a very fresh and different perspective to the community, which benefits the whole community. At 360iDevMini this year I witnessed amazing talks by Alicia and Juliana, which were very inspirational and educational.

I do see a shift in conferences, where we see more women presenters and organizers. Conferences like IndieDevStock which was organized by women (Tammy, Angela) are a great example. Also, Try Swift is a great conference organized by our very own NatashaTheRobot.

Let’s move to the other side of the palindrome, Race. I can only talk about my race, South Asian because last time I checked I was a South Asian good looking guy. As, I mentioned I have attended a lot of iOS conferences (see above) but I have never seen any South Asian presenter at iOS conference. There are couple of reasons for it. First, there are not many South Asians in iOS community. The reason for that it the entry price tag. We are very price agnostic and not really willing to put down $1000–$2000 on a Mac + iPhone etc. The other reason is that most South Asians are 501 developers. This means as soon as the clock struck 5:00 PM we close our laptop and we are done! That is the reason there are not many submissions from South Asians. If you are a conference organizer then I challenge you to go through your submission list and find a handful of South Asians who submitted a topic for your talk.

Elite Club

One interesting thing Pedro mentioned is that how some speakers simply pick a fancy title on the latest hot thing and present it with no real world experience. Go and look at different iOS conferences and see how many times you find sessions on “Protocol Oriented Programming with Swift”, “Server Side Swift” etc. Speakers will pick a hot title, get selected and create a presentation without any real world context or experience of the technology. Now, I am not saying all speakers are like that but I have seen this more than often.

When I presented “Creating Stickers and iMessages Apps in iOS 10” at IndieDevStock and 360iDevMini, I already had 4 iMessages Apps in the App Store. If I am going to talk about Server Side Swift Using Vapor then you bet your ass I am working on a Vapor project.

The other issue that I have been hearing a lot lately is that even though there is a Call for Papers, organizers have already made up their mind who they are going to select as a speaker. Now, you might argue that in that case why would they even have a Call for Papers. Well, call for papers creates excitement and more importantly .. hope!

Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. Shawshank Redemption

But we need to also look at this from the organizer’s point of view. No one wants to attend a conference where some random person is talking. The attendees has travelled from far places and paid a decent amount to attend and more importantly learn from the conference.

I think the solution for this particular problem is the right balance. We defintely need the developers from the Immortal group but we also need people who bring a different perspective to the conference. People who are interested in playing cricket, funny, good looking people with a great sense of humor! Hold on I lost my train of thought!

But seriously! We do need a group of people who are fresh. By fresh I don’t mean some random person from the street but people who are involved in the community, have presented before in different conferences and are good are public speaking.

I think if every conference is giving opportunity to 2–3 new speakers then we are creating a better, balanced community as well as a better future.