The Power of Regional Conferences

I am a serious believer in the power of regional conferences.

For me, I’d been to conferences. As an in-house developer in big organizations, it was always exciting for me to be sent to Tech Ed or Ignite or Build or Dev Connections — getting sent to a conference was always a mark that you were significant enough in the organization that management was willing to send you off at great expense to get… something … out of the conference.

Thing is, that “something” wasn’t always clearly defined. And the vibe at the big Microsoft shows? It always felt very much a big polished marketing spiel. Nothing wrong with that. Since I was most familiar with the Microsoft stack, I didn’t mind learning more about my craft, but when I would take the information back, I always felt more like I was parroting some Microsoft bullet points than truly bringing back development value.

See, I’d never been mentored through what the conference was supposed to be. I’d always heard them referred to as “boondoggles”, and the people around me suggested that mid-management would often skip sessions and run off with vendors to make deals on the golf course. Stereotypical? Sure. But what did I know back then? Could have been true.

So while I went to sessions and learned a few things, I never really truly felt like I was in the right place doing the right thing.

CodeMash 2012, at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio, changed all that for me in a number of ways.

This was back when Jim Holmes was running the show. 2012 was the year they had Ted Neward keynoting. I remember that he stirred up some controversy during that keynote, and I remember feeling alive in a way I hadn’t before. I remember sitting in the breakfast hall being introduced to the conference life and hearing about the various tenets of attending:

• The Law of Two Feet: If at any point you are not learning nor teaching, or you feel that where you are is not the right place, you owe it to yourself to use your two feet and find a place where you belong. Life is short, maximize your experience.
• Local conferences are places to get our of your comfort zone. When you go to the meals, make sure you sit with new people. Introduce yourself. Don’t let being shy or introverted get in your way. The person you talk to has a lot in common with you just by being there. This is a safe space for you to interact. Interaction is encouraged and available.
• Keynotes set the tone. That year, Ted’s keynote was irreverent to say the least. It was controversial. It got a buzz on twitter. But having a keynote that everyone sat through gave us something in common, a talking point, a conversation-starter. Keynotes and messages from the organizers really do matter.
• Open Spaces, discussions that are happen organically and are not part of the main program, are a thing that sound like they shouldn’t work, but not only do they work, they can be some of the most targeted, appropriate, engaging, and illuminating sessions you can attend.

So first off, I learned that regional conferences are places where you are meant to interact, where you are supposed to both teach and learn. Where you can have an opinion, and it can be controversial, but since you are in the marketplace of technical ideas, you bear the responsibility not just to evangelize all the good you know, but to critically analyze all ideas, including your own. It is an environment of safe but respectful challenges to your ideas, your ego, and your self.

Second, I went to a full day seminar on HTML 5 with Clark Sell and Brandon Satrom. I’d never met Brandon before, but I’d worked with Clark on a small awesome team of folks back in the early 00s at Allstate. While I hung out in the big organizations as an Architect, he moved on to Microsoft as a Development Evangelist building communities and spreading great development practices and knowledge wherever he went. Clark and I went out for drinks where he told me about a conference he was putting together up in the Wisconsin Dells.

“I learned that regional conferences are places where you are meant to interact…”

The Conference he was putting together was That Conference 2012. He asked me if I’d like to help with it, to be part of the volunteer team that pulled it all together and made it happen. Having just found this amazing world of people interacting and teaching and learning, I was excited to be part of creating something new, another place where people could come together and improve themselves and each other.

So in 2012, I got to not only be an attendee of my first regional conference, but I got to also help organize one. And I learned a lot that year about how these regional conferences differ from the extremely large conferences:

• Cost. At only a couple hundred dollars a ticket, these conferences are extremely affordable compared to the national conferences. At a couple thousand per ticket, and with hotel rooms a couple hundred dollars a night, and meal expenses, a 4-day conference could easily run a company $3,000 — $4,000. It’s not likely for a person to be able to self-sponsor that, so an employee is at the mercy of the employer’s training budget and maybe internal politics. A regional conference can run you less than $1k, meaning that if an employer isn’t willing to pay for an employee to attend, a couple days PTO and $1k might be all it takes to find an employer that values learning more.
• Focus: The organizers are tech-agnostic. While many conferences have roots in some local user group aligned to a particular stack, the point is not to sell any particular language, platform, or tool. The point is to knock ideas and people together to make more amazing things happen in the world. Whether it’s helping developers learn a new stack or helping them find a better fit with a different organization or helping them or helping them learn more about their own stack, the conferences care more about creation and content, not flavor.
• Speakers: The speakers at the regional conferences are generally volunteering their time. These aren’t paid speaking slots. These people are passionate about getting their message out. They are generally more accessible and willing to answer questions, both after sessions and over Twitter. They are often local and can speak to the local technical environment.
• Culture: The big conferences have a single dynamic. The person with the knowledge stands in front of the room and the people that want to acquire knowledge all sit facing the same direction. There’s a sense of hierarchy. Those with knowledge and those without. Regional conferences feel more egalitarian. The attendee you see there one year might be a speaker the next, but still feel like an attendee. There’s a sense that you’re all teaching and learning. That the community and therefore our field is improved with every connection and every conversation.
• Community: I guess you could lump this under “culture”, too, but whenever I attended a big national conference, I felt really lonely. Too many people and too few meaningful connections. At the regional conferences, however, you’re seeing the same few hundred people in your sessions over the course of several days, and it feels as if the chance of having a meaningful conversation vastly increases.

Fast forward to now. We have recently put That Conference 2017 to bed and are already working hard on things to keep the conversation going year ‘round, starting with regular content here, on our YouTube channel, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter!

Also, Save the Date and plan to come out to see us August 6 through August 8, 2018! Better still, come up a couple days early and enjoy some preconference time with your fellow Campers!