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I'm sorry but I disagree. The reason why you have so many people don't know anything about node&js is because of aggressive marketing & a referral plan. It's w

by dscape 14y ago

I'm sorry but I disagree. The reason why you have so many people don't know anything about node&js is because of aggressive marketing & a referral plan. It's what happens when you sell tickets to companies, for a price that is too high, and incentivize people to sell to their friends for some bounty you offer. This isn't necessarily wrong, but trying to mask it as a "good thing" is naive at best. ps. From an actual email sent to me from someone I have no idea who it is: As an active participant in these technologies, you may be interested in joining our Conference Affiliate Program for Fluent. If you'd like to become an affiliate, you can link to the event through your blog/website and earn affiliate fees of $250 for every eligible referral. It's simple and takes minutes to sign up, so take a look and let me know if have any questions. To participate, sign up directly on this online form and we'll send you everything you need to get started within a couple of days: http://fluentconf.com/fluent2012/public/sv/q/398 http://fluentconf.com/fluent2012/public/sv/q/398

petercooper 14y ago
It's what happens when you sell tickets to companies, for a price that is too high, and incentivize people to sell to their friends for some bounty you offer. The latter part certainly wasn't true. I can't share details but having seen the data, the number of attendees who came in via that method was pointlessly low from my POV. Perhaps it works well on other events, but I thought offering a plan like this on a first time conference was a bit silly.. who's going to refer someone to an event they know nothing about? ;-) Were the tickets relatively high priced and primarily sold to company-affiliated developers? I think that's fair to say. That's O'Reilly's approach for its conferences. I can't change that, but I think it's a market worth serving in any case, especially as other audience types are well served by other events in the JS world. Naïvely or not, I think having a diverse audience of both beginners and experts is a good thing, especially when those beginners were saying they were leaving with so many ideas and ambitions to learn about things they'd seen. Not every conference is aiming to bring beginners into the fold, but O'Reilly seems to promote this approach (consider they have a full day of workshops, mostly introductions to new technologies, so targeting people ready to learn is intentional from their POV, I think). Disclaimer: I was a program chair responsible for getting the program right. Everything else is managed and controlled by full time conference organizers at O'Reilly, so most of the above is just my opinion of other people's hard work.

by dscape 14y ago

petercooper 14y ago

It's what happens when you sell tickets to companies, for a price that is too high, and incentivize people to sell to their friends for some bounty you offer. The latter part certainly wasn't true. I can't share details but having seen the data, the number of attendees who came in via that method was pointlessly low from my POV. Perhaps it works well on other events, but I thought offering a plan like this on a first time conference was a bit silly.. who's going to refer someone to an event they know nothing about? ;-) Were the tickets relatively high priced and primarily sold to company-affiliated developers? I think that's fair to say. That's O'Reilly's approach for its conferences. I can't change that, but I think it's a market worth serving in any case, especially as other audience types are well served by other events in the JS world. Naïvely or not, I think having a diverse audience of both beginners and experts is a good thing, especially when those beginners were saying they were leaving with so many ideas and ambitions to learn about things they'd seen. Not every conference is aiming to bring beginners into the fold, but O'Reilly seems to promote this approach (consider they have a full day of workshops, mostly introductions to new technologies, so targeting people ready to learn is intentional from their POV, I think). Disclaimer: I was a program chair responsible for getting the program right. Everything else is managed and controlled by full time conference organizers at O'Reilly, so most of the above is just my opinion of other people's hard work.