Finding a way to make Railsberry 2014 happen
The sum is bigger than the parts.
Yes, yes, it’s been a while since we last said “hi!”.
It’s been an adventurous year for us. Many of you know that Applicake—the team behind Railsberry and Mobile Mobile Conf—joined Base CRM. That was great and exciting news for us… but left us wondering what’s going to happen next with some of our “little fun projects”. Railsberry was one of those fun projects when we first dreamed it up in 2011… which turned up to be not so “little” in the end and a proper full time job for a few people.
We needed a few months to adjust to the new reality. We all needed some break, too. I (Ela writing) am actually still on a sabbatical—hugs from Buenos Aires! We felt a lot of pressure to “announce things” but, truth be told, we didn’t know if Railsberry would be possible at all. So we did not know what to say. Now that things calmed down for us a little and we’re a tad closer to knowing, it’s a good moment to share.
Railsberry originally started for us as a continuation of EuRuKo and as an excuse to meet friends in Kraków. We knew how much work it’s going to take to organize another big event and that it, realistically, can’t be our full-time focus now. But we had this overwhelming feeling that it would be sad if Railsberry 2013 was the last one… So we sat down to see if we could make Railsberry happen somehow.
Distilling why we did Railsberry, and later MMConf, in the first place, and why we can’t let go on it easily, we came up with what defines the spirit of Railsberry. It’s the amazing community (you!) and the addictive energy & inspiration that came from hosting everyone in the cute little town of Kraków. Everything else was a nice-to-have, we really believe that. We can do a smaller, less formalized event in the Railsberry spirit. And we will be able to do it precisely with the energy and inspiration from the community — help from the amazing Basia and Emi from WebMuses (if not for them, we’d not commit to Railsberry this year, hug them when you see them!), the magic-making Dorota, the hyper-creative Socha, the most reliable Piotrek, and myself. All of us will be doing it after hours and we might need help in the coming months.
As we’re working on the details, this is what we know for sure:
- There will be Railsberry 2014 (yay!).
- It will take place in Kraków in the last week of September / first week of October. We’ll confirm the dates soon as soon as we book the venue.
- It will be smaller than last year and possibly fully community-driven.
- We know some of our favorite speakers will likely show (looking at you Linda, Jose, Chad!) but we’re tempted to experiment with a format of an unconference/barcamp/meetup, which are new for us and require less planning. We want to be realistic and start with the date and the commitment and see how much we can do without overloading ourselves. Railsberry is a fun event and a fun community and we want to keep it fun for us.
- While the final format is yet to be defined, content-wise we do know that also this year Railsberry will be not a Rails conference as such again. We want to invite the MMConf community and focus on how technology can be used for solving problems that really matter. That very focus was a really important motivation for me personally. I will write more about it soon.
Stay tuned for more news, pencil the date in your calendar, share (railsberry@gmail.com or twitter), send your thoughts on the formula and think about what you’d like to learn at Railsberry 2014. We’ll send out a quick survey soon.
It’s also ok to send us smiles, hearts, cute furry animal pictures and other nice things on twitter or facebook. It will be a busy year for us (so that’s a bit scary) but it will be nice to see the truest Railsberry fans in Kraków again. Here’s to more experiments!
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