How we’re changing Colombia through Open Source communities — and why we need your help

Published in

Juan’s And Zeroes

9 min readOct 15, 2015

TL;DR — organizing conferences in a developing nation is very hard, and as much as we’ve tried to hit our financial goals, we need some community ❤. Read below a story of how OSS communities have grown in our country, despite the challenges, and/or buy a sticker or a t-shirt and so we can meet our objectives.

“El Asbesto Mata” — por DjLu / Juegasiempre + Lesivo || “Asbestus Kills” — by DjLu / Juegasiempre + Lesivo

It would be naive to pretend that one of the first things that comes to your mind when you hear the word “Colombia” isn’t our dark past and muggy present. You know what I’m talking about. A story that’s not over, one I was born into, and which I have been immediately associated to whenever I say where I come from. But I’m here to change your mind.

Next time you hear about Colombia, I’d like you to think about how Open Source Software communities are coming together to change the face of this violence-ridden nation, before the rest of it comes to mind.

Did you know Colombia has the largest Spanish speaking JavaScript community in the world?

BogotaJS and MedellínJS, with 1,714 and 1,735 members are by far the largest JS Meetup groups in the entire Latin-American region, including Mexico City, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Lima. Since the foundation of BogotaJS, by John Acosta four years ago, 9 more meetups joined the ColJS family: MedellínJS, CaliJS, VillavicencioJS, QuibdóJS, PereiraJS, MonteriaJS, PopayánJS, ManizalesJS and BarranquillaJS. That’s about 4000 members in 4 years.

This meetup was born right after we organized the first ever BogotaConf, an attempt inspired by the many south-american RubyConfs that were popping up and my exposure to the software community in NYC. For 8 months, and with the help of a crazy entrepreneur, a couple of co-organizers(1), and the support of 1 company to whom I will forever be indebted to, we organized our first ever software conference.

As much as I think that telling you about each conference we’ve done since 2011 in Colombia can be a very educational experience, it’s not the objective of this post. After BogotaConf 2011, came BogotaConf 2012, then the first ever JSConf.co in 2013. This has steadily kept the community alive and growing. In addition to these, other organizations besides ours have had similar efforts organizing events like Colombia 3.0, BarCampMed, and PlatziConf, which while not entirely OSS focused have fed off each-others impact in the country to maintain and grow healthy communities.

So what is this post really about?

Well, it turns out that this week we’re doubling the amount of events we’ve ever organized, but we may not be able to meet our financial goals and we’d like to try something we’ve never done in the past, reach out to the international community for crowd-funding.

Here’s what we’re up to over the next few days, all not-for-profit community organized events:

DevFestCo (100% funded, but could use some snacks)

We’re organizing the first ever DevFestCo, this is a free 1 day event which aims to bring many different OSS communities that are just getting started with their organization. It’s our attempt at sharing our community experience with new organizations, our logistical support and a free space to organize and empower themselves for growth. The ideal goal is next year one of them makes the jump and runs an event themselves.

We’ll have talks about PHP, Go, Python, Erlang, Elixir, Clojure, Scala, Haskell, Functional Programming, UX, UI testing, NoSQL DBs, C#, Xamarin and Objetive C. All powered by JS (lol). Just kidding, but being serious, this programming festival is powered by the JSConf.co team, Hooklift Inc., the company I work for, and our friends at Ruta N who are donating 100% of the venue costs.

This event is fully funded, but we could use some snacks and coffee ;)

JSConf.co 2015 (100% funded)

Sticking to what we know best, we’re bringing a bunch of awesome JS wizards, from around the world and our country to repeat the great fun we had in 2013 and keep growing our awesome JS community.

This event is fully funded, and we may even have some $$ for the next one for the first time ever!!!

RubyConfCo ( 80% funded)

The first ever RubyConf in Colombia. Born out from the news of the possible shutdown of some of the RubyConfs south of the equator. We have a ridiculously awesome lineup, but since we put together a brand new team of organizers, the suggestion was to take smaller risks than JSConf.co, have less international guests, and try to play it safe until we knew the local adoption given the smaller Ruby community in Colombia. We’re also piggy backing on many of the logistics and infrastructure that JSConf.co has, to make it easier on ourselves, and thanks to community spirit of this team.

This event is not fully funded, and as much as we’ve cut down on most of the items, we’re not there yet.

Why do we need help?

Well, as you can see one of our events is struggling financially and we’d like to use one of our life lines. No matter what, we’re committed to make this event happen, and I’m ready to put the money out-of-pocket as we’ve done in the past, but in any case, this is also an opportunity for us to market our community, and to bring some light to the difficulties that others may be having.

Why? Well, some of us in the organizing team are very privileged with access to excellent US networks, have good jobs so we can “give away” our spare time and money to make sure others learn. In addition to this, it’s also a great opportunity for others to learn about about:

The efforts that Colombian OSS communities are making to change our nation’s future through software and education.
How different and difficult it is to organize a conference outside of the common scenarios, in developed nations. And since you’re all so interested on diversity, bring some light to the difficulty many other international communities may be struggling with just like we do.

What we won’t compromise on

First of all, having the great opportunity of starting a community from scratch means we can rewrite some of the cultural anti-patterns that are defaults in other places. For this reason, our international events (JSconf.co, RubyConfCo) have the following guidelines:

we will cover the full costs of any speaker, accommodation and travel from any part of the world.
we will attempt to cover or reimburse workshoppers for their travel and accommodation
we will limit the amount of international speakers so we can highlight our own people and their work
we will pay for child-care for any parents who require it, including our scholarship recipients, and will provide travel reimbursements to significant others of speakers who are new parents (less than 1yr olds).
we will reserve a portion of our tickets for under-represented populations, and when possible provide travel and accommodation costs. These are reserved for residents of the Colombian territory for the time being.
we will only pay for transportation/accommodation of those organizers who absolutely require it
we will make our tickets affordable to the local community
organizers will not make any money
we will aim to leave some budget for future events so others don’t have such a steep hill to climb
each event will run independent finances, and independent teams

The global economic challenges

To the surprise of many, the cost structure of organizing a conference in a developing nation is very similar to organizing one in the US, sometimes even more expensive.

Some facts:

each international speaker costs us around $2k
venue and A/V costs are around $20k for both events
JSConf.co is projected to cost about $60k
RubyConfCo is projected to cost around $35k (after aggressive adjustments)
we do not provide lunch for any event, which adds about 30% to our costs

Up to here, things look kinda normal, but when you start looking into the economic realities of Colombian software developers, things start getting tricky.

Here’s a chart of the average monthly wages in Medellín, compared to the cost of an early-bird ticket at our events

How does the above compare to your city?

Here’s how our original projections looked like, based on the above:

expecting sold out events, at 150 and 100 avg ticket price — based on past events

Then the world economy happened and the Colombian peso lost about 40% of its value in the past year.

This is how the prices for our tickets behaved:

ticket price variation due to COP devaluation

when we priced, you could buy 1 early-bird JSConf.co ticket for $100 USD — $200,000 COP
when sales started, people had to pay $100 USD — $250,000 COP for the same early bird ticket
when regular tickets hit the ground at $125, they cost almost $400,000 COP
any small increase on our part started hurting our attendees, so we decided to keep all regular tickets at the same price, and in RubyConfCo we added discount pricing

This is how our real numbers look like

Bring on those sponsors

Experience in past events has taught us that in order to be able to run events in Colombia, and given the income of our attendees in comparison to our costs, requires us to depend aggressively on sponsorships. The impact the devaluation of the peso had in our budget made the need for sponsorship more necessary (rubyconf was more severely affected) and so we started pitching everyone we could.

We went shopping around many, many Colombian “tech companies” and the results were:

0 Colombian companies gave cash to JSConf
our awesome Colombian friends at Monoku took over all the marketing work for JSConf.co, on their own dime ❤
2 Colombian companies gave cash to RubyConf ❤ Kommit, Make It Real
our awesome Colombian friends at Koombea took over all the marketing work for RubyConf.co, on their own dime ❤

<rant>
Unless Colombian tech companies start investing in the local communities by putting real money where their mouth is, Colombia will NEVER be the next tech hub. Not now, not ever. We’ll keep losing our top talent to US consulting companies, while all of these organizations consume Open Source like there is no tomorrow, ask for Github profiles to their interviewees and close doors on communities when we ask for $100 to pay for pizza and soda for a meetup.
</rant>

Developing nations depend on US companies to fund our communities, there is zero doubt of that. For this I’m extremely thankful, because we’ve built all this on your support. But it also worries me, because it’s thanks to mine and other’s networks that we were able to raise this money. We are able to rely on the community track record of several of our co-organizers.

What I’d like to bring to your attention here, is that unless we find a real way to fund communities in developing nations we will never break the cycle where white men and women go around the world teaching everyone else about software because we can’t afford to have our own role models speak to us.

How can you help?

next time you hear Colombia, think about Software not drugs
buy a colombia.dev sticker
buy a colombia.dev t-shirt (straight cut, fitted cut, tank-top, hoodie)
if you visit Colombia, come to a meetup

Any money raised will be used the following way, in descending order:

cover the budget of RubyConfCo, $7k <o>
pay for snacks & coffee of DevFestCo, $1k
buy lunch for all organizers of these events, $1k
build a community fund for meetups anywhere in Colombia
kickstart next year’s conference budget

We will open our finances after we’ve done the event consolidation, so other organizations in developing nations can use these numbers as a base for their needs, and not start from US/Europe centric templates.

The real credits

Since I am just the spokesman, I’d like to make sure you know who the people who are behind these monumental community efforts are.

A special mention to Catherine Lopez, who doesn’t write software, but has put in more time in the past year than all of other co-organizers, combined. It’s thanks to her that these three events will happen. You may also know her from EmpireJS and EmpireNode.

The JSConf.co Team

The RubyConfCo Team

If you ever bump into any of them, please give them a hug cause they’re changing the face of a nation on their spare time :D

Footnotes:
(1): Giovanny Beltran, Annabelle Handdoek