Sometimes people might question the tangible value of going to a conference. You're out of the office for a few days, so you lose that work time. You attend a ton of sessions and you're drinking from a fire hose, so after about half a day you feel totally overwhelmed. Does any of it stick? I can tell you for sure that it does. The other day someone in my

This year the Toronto folks managed to record audio and video for the YAPC::NA conference sessions, as reported on use.perl.org After a few months of availability, Fulko Hew has shared his stats with me: 7 mail-orders 111 CD downloads 953 DVD downloads private duplications 4 Terabytes Given that the DVD was 4.23 Gig, that's a lot of bits, both for the sender and receiver. I don't think that

As I mentioned previously, I recently attended the Gartner Open Source Summit. While there I participated in a new type of session Gartner has started moderating called a round table session, and I think it's a really cool idea. When you attend a Gartner conference, you are eligible to sign up for one-on-one sessions with the Gartner analysts. This is a nice perk, since you usually have to pay for

Last week I attended the first annual Gartner Open Source Summit Gartner is a major IT market researcher and consultant, specifically for large businesses. The fact that this conference exists speaks volumes for the penetration of open source in all sorts of IT shops. OSS hung under the radar for quite a while because it doesn't show up in any of the traditional data that analysts use to measure market

Below is the bid submitted by the Vancouver group. Location: Vancouver, Canada. Located on the west coast of Canada, Vancouver is a novel choice for YAPC. Vancouver is the largest city in the province of British Columbia and the third largest city in Canada. It's surrounded by water on three sides and is nestled alongside the Coast Mountain Range. Vancouver is home to spectacular natural scenery and a bustling metropolitan

Below is the bid submitted by the Chicago group. Chicago was selected to host YAPC::NA::2006. Overview Who we are Why Chicago? Dates and Location Facilities Facility Location Facility Layout and Capacity A/V and Internet arrangements Cost Summary Individual Costs: $245 Travel Conference Fees Per Person: $55 Conference: Possible! Accommodations Low-Cost Arrangements Hotels Transportation

Below is the bid submitted by the Boston group. NAME SYNOPSIS CRITERIA Estimated Costs Site 1: University of Massachusetts: Boston Campus Site 2: Simmons College Site 3: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Readily Accessible Location Public Transportation Facilities UMass Boston Simmons MIT Internet Access from Conference Location Internet Access from Accomodations New Location Affordable

I was previously posting TPF conferences-related information to my personal blog on use.perl.org. Now we have this excellent TPF blog for TPF info, so I'll be posting here. As I said in a previous post all of the bids this year were quite good. To give a little more transparency into the voting process, you can see the anonymous vote breakdowns below: Boston Chicago Vancouver 2840 2980 2690