[yapc] YAPC::NA SOLD OUT!!!

[Matt S Trout]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 12:37:10PM -0500, JT Smith wrote:
> I saw his comment on that, and we do have a solution for that to some extent; more on that in a few weeks. But you can't put the banquet in two rooms. It's not just the talks, it's everything. The entire venue space and all the activities have been planned around 400 people. It's better to limit the numbers you can support and ensure that those that spent all the money to come have a good time, than to invite more than you can reasonably handle ensuring that many will be pissed about money spent and wasted.  The cost of the ticket to YAPC after all is by far the smallest cost for most YAPC attendees. 

This.

This, and your other comments, should have been in the blog post.

That's what I was originally asking for - clarification. The fact that we
hard to work hard to get your rationale out of you was the thing that bothered
me.

> We're promoting the hell out of the conference to the point that some have called us spammers.

But genuine communication about decisions being taken and the reasons
why hasn't been as prevalent.

Had your blog post said "we're calling it for the moment because we want to
ensure attendee experience - while we may be able to get a larger room for
some things or a second room, the dinner simply can't be scaled any further
and that's true of many other activities. But please watch this space for
further news, we're working on something that will be of great interest to
those of you who've missed out but we aren't quite ready to announce it"
I'd've been applauding you.

If you go back and update it, I'll be applauding you.

"Sold out" at 411 attendees in a location big enough overall (I know that
you only have a small subset of it) that I'm getting comments along the
lines of "I'm mystified as to how one sells out a vanue that size without
bringing in 10k people or so" needed an explanation.

> Change is tough. I don't think the changes are we've made are so sweeping that it will be a bad conference, but I am willing to risk it because I think its time for YAPC to evolve.  Perl has evolved dramatically in the past few years, but YAPC has largely remained the same. I'm happy to take full responsibility for it. =)

I respect that. I'm saying that the brevity of the post doesn't strike me
as good promotion, and that while you're convinced that the things you're
doing are the right thing to do, you don't seem to be being very successful
at promoting those changes to the core community, and given you seem to be
doing so well at promoting the conference overall that seems like it must be
an omission rather than a capability problem - so speaking up so the omission
can be fixed seemed like a good idea.

> If you really don't want to come to YAPC because you think we're doing a bad job, I'm sorry to hear that. I'm certainly willing to take you off the speaking schedule if you decide you don't want to come because you don't think it's going to be fun. I certainly wouldn't want you to feel obligated to come.

If I'd decided I didn't want to come, I would have said that.

-- 
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