ronin coder

There’s been a vigorous discussion on the PDX.rb mailing list about the future of FOSCON, our little home-grown free-as-in-beer Ruby mini-con that has taken place during OSCON for the last three years. The conference organizers at O’Reilly have decided to move the event to San Jose next year, which breaks the symbiotic relationship that has made FOSCON so much easier to plan and ensure attendance for each year.

There seem to be at least two different ideas gaining some degree of buy-in: first, a volunteer-driven replacement for OSCON itself, covering the full bredth of open source software and hardware topics, and second, a Ruby-specific event, in the vein of the RubyCentral-funded regional events already held elsewhere.

Personally, I’m going to work on a third option. Based on my experience at RubyFringe, I think there’s a place for a small (100-200 attendee), focused conference without any outside sponsorship. I also think that one of the unrecognized reasons RubyFringe was such a success was that it absolutely was not designed by committee. Pete, Meghann, and a handful of other people really took the event forward, without trying to get consensus from a large decision-making group.

This is why I don’t want to get the Seattle Ruby brigade involved at the very beginning, or even involve the idea to Legion of Tech before things have started to gel on their own. I don’t want the need to maintain a PG-13 rating, or to feature everyone’s favorite local project, to get in the way of a kick-ass event.

I think there’s a place for a whole spectrum of conference types, and I love the fact that the community is rallying so quickly to fill the gap left by the departure of RailsConf and OSCON from our fair city. I just don’t really care about the big conferences, so I’m going to let other people fill those shoes while I go play in the woods for a while.