Gowestconf: The little conference that could
Gowestconf has 3 goals: highlight Rocky Mountain tech, get big names in the Go community into the area and make an accessible and affordable conference. Let’s chat about what we did for each of these areas.
Highlight Rocky Mountain Tech:
I have two main ways of getting tech companies to be represented at a conference:
- Have an employee speak at the conference
- Have a company sponsor the conference
In the past, we have been very fortunate to have lots of local speakers, but people are not speaking like they used to (I wrote about that here), and unfortunately we did not have many local companies with speakers who wanted to participate this year.
For me, getting sponsors is hard. It is always about connections, but due to the economic downturn, many of my contacts at local companies no longer have resources to sponsor, or companies are no longer willing to donate (link to sponsor requirements) as it could tarnish their image if they are forced to lay off. Risky conditions aside, we ended up having some major local companies rally at the end to provide a venue, a speaker, sponsorships, and represent the local tech scene. Thank you Weave, Live Auctioneers, and MX! I know there are a lot of companies that use Go and were not represented. I hope in time we will be able to see more companies who were not able to participate this year and even expand to highlight the Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Boise tech communities.
Bringing Big Names in the Go Community into the Area:
Our strategy here started with targeting speakers and sponsors. Our Call For Papers invites did produce many incredible speakers this year, but due to various conflicts, many prominent names were unable to attend, and either did not submit or rescinded their submissions.
We also got many big-name companies to sponsor including Ardan Labs, Synadia, and Tailscale. Many of the remote companies that sponsor often do not send representatives as the monetary commitment is minimal. This year I also found some success in getting sponsors via Twitter messages. Our gracious sponsors this year gave us the needed economic support to put on our small-budget conference and order food, and shirts, pay for streaming platforms, support our staff, and create a valuable local conference experience.
There were some other major setbacks in getting Go team members and other community icons to attend. Our biggest obstacle this year was the conference marathon happening right now to the end of 2022. It seemed like all US-based conferences were trying to schedule their conferences in October. GopherCon, Kubecon, Qcon, and many other large conferences overshadowed GoWestConf. As software engineers chose where to spend their limited time, GoWestConf was put to the side in favor of attending a large conference.
An Accessible and Affordable Conference:
Some people spend their entire careers working toward accessibility. I know that we at GoWestConf have in the past left accessibility as an afterthought, and we have a lot of room for improvement. I know I tried specifically to make sure our online platform had subtitles, used YouTube closed captions, and we try to always have dietary requirements met.
My co-organizer, Derrick Laird, is very focused on an affordable conference. This year we charged $100 per in-person ticket and the online tickets were a suggested price of $10 (the price was editable to be any amount from $0-$1000). This makes our budget very limited and smaller than almost any other tech conference. Included below is an example budget. Our operating budget is $15,000, and we get $4,000 of that from ticket sales. To put this in perspective, an equivalent conference of this size needs an operating budget of $100k. Most of this money goes to the venue and A/V costs. We are grateful we could operate on a small budget due to Weave donating their meeting space and A/V as well as the amazing sponsors we have.
It took all of us on the GoWestConf team an entire year of preparation to get the hybrid conference ready to go. We focused on making an interactive online platform that would be within our budget by having an exciting and inviting conference lineup and trying to limit unforeseen difficulties by having remote speakers pre-record their talks who weren’t able to be there in person.
The Event
October 21st, 2022 we had a day full of events. Conferences always have failures, the experience of the conference comes from minimizing failures and letting them play out behind the scenes. For me, this conference felt full of failures, so we are going to start with some conference highlights and then I will enumerate all the hiccups that were unfortunately unavoidable.
The day started with a handful of helpful hands. Shout out to Annalisa, Ryan, and Paul Mackay who were attentive and ready to help. Ryan was in charge of the virtual experience and started immediately helping attendees access the video feeds, join appropriate channels and get their questions answered. Annalisa ran the check-in greeting every guest that came in and Paul made sure all the last details were in place.
I was surprised immediately by the visit of a dear friend, Bill Kennedy, who I thought had work conflicts. I was unable to make it to GopherCon due to conference planning and it was nice to get this surprise.
We had amazing speakers this year. Most were able to attend in person and gave interactive talks and did a great job of interacting with the conference attendees. The speakers who gave recorded talks were amazing and attentive on discord to answer any questions. I could not have been more pleased with the line-up.
We tried to have ample opportunity for the community to participate. We have an hour of community lightning talks as well as round table sessions. These events were well attended and amazing. Thanks again to Paul MacKay who helped with the roundtable, Brendan Ashton who led the testing discussion, and Jason Newman who was a fantastic MC and kept the lightning talks moving.
It started with some A/V issues. I normally use his venue twice a month for meetups. Normally we only connect the A/V to Google Meet, but this time we needed to stream, record, and present the slides. We were using Streamyard’s platform for streaming and recording, but Streamyard was not recognizing the venue’s mics and cameras. Working with Weave’s IT we were able to connect the mics and camera in the main room just before the conference started, but we were never able to connect the camera in the second room and unfortunately, for two hours we lost the camera recording and streaming in the main room. The real hurdle for online attendees was an audio glitch. From 3 pm on there was no audio or visual for either track online. We verified all hardware, my computers were getting an audio feed, and my computer was getting slides, but the platform that was streaming two tracks was not transmitting or recording audio. I made sure to file a ticket with the streaming platform so that they can improve their software. I love the tech and want them to be able to improve.
Lastly, one last thank you to the members of the GoWestConf team and the attendees! We had some really special people there this year, made some really good friends, and have a great community. We love the content provided, the discussions had, and the great connections made. We are excited to continue the conference and to grow. We hope in the future to see a larger representation of the regional community and to connect with other companies using Go to make incredible software.
