[yapc] Explanation About YAPC::NA News Posting

[JT Smith]

Some of you have emailed me about me posting a job to this mailing list. You're probably going to be taken aback a bit by the posting that I'm doing for YAPC::NA, because I'm doing something that has never been attempted before. I'm giving you news about YAPC::NA 2012 every single day between now and the conference. In fact, I've already been doing this for the past 6 months. You may not have known about it, because I haven't been doing it to this mailing list, because I only just found out about this mailing list. 

I want to keep you informed about YAPC::NA 2012. There's lots of news to share. We got lots of sponsors, information about talks and workshops and the hackathon, hotels, food, beer, sight seeing, contests, the spouses program, Perl: The Next Generation, the job fair, and much much more. 

Today's posting clearly ruffled a few feathers because it happens to be a job posting. Maybe it's because it's a job posting for a company that I own, I'm not sure. However, if I had been posting to this mailing list for the last 6 months (had I known about it), you would have seen job postings for Dyn, cPanel, and Best Practical already. So it's not just for Plain Black. This is actually a feature we're offering to all YAPC sponsors: http://www.yapcna.org/sponsorship/levels-of-sponsorship

Another complaint that has been lodged is that this mailing list might be used by other YAPCs and clearly these sponsors haven't sponsored those other YAPCs and therefore the post is out of scope. By that reasoning, anything that didn't apply to *all* YAPCs would be out of scope, and therefore nobody would post anything to this mailing list. 

The mailing list is a tool for YAPC organizers to communicate with those people interested in YAPC. I was asked earlier this week why I hadn't been posting news to this mailing list since I've been posting it to blogs.perl.org and other places. I didn't know about the list, so I hadn't posted here. 

I'm not sorry that I'm doing something different from what has been done before. I'm attempting to bring YAPC into the modern world of event planning, so that instead of having sliding numbers from year to year, we have advancing numbers. Now that you understand where YAPC is heading, I hope that my future posts to the list won't be as jarring. 

JT Smith
Director, YAPC::NA 2012