the brutal beauty of the community tech conference

When I entered tech something that became very apparent to me, very quickly was that I liked conferences. Despite typical introverted struggles (being shit at approaching people, my social battery being wiped out for days after, etc) I still found them exciting. There was something about the community feeling, the celebration, the passion and personality on display, the euphoria of a bunch of nerds sharing their momentary hyperfixations.

Admittedly I was naive, or perhaps privileged, because my first conferences were all smaller community affairs, not huge, impersonal, corporate events. It’s my firm belief after being to several conferences on either extreme and, in all variations between those, that community run events are superior. The challenge, however, is that these events require a degree of courage because they have a very good chance of breaking your heart.

~ some natural beauty from a conf - a green anole lizard on a stone bench above purple wildflowers ~

nothing gold can stay

If you talk to people who regularly attend conferences about conferences (especially if they’re in a role like devrel & attend a ton) eventually someone will mention the ones that are no longer around: the one with the weird name, the one with the novel theme, the one in the middle of nowhere. Even if they don’t fit any of those strange cases, chances are pretty high that at least one of the conferences mourned is a small community affair.

Tech conferences exist on a spectrum - from the largest, most corporate, Vegas attendance level affairs to gatherings that look like multi-day meetups, budgets bootstrapped by the organizers themselves, with a significant amount of the crowd themselves speakers. This isn’t a coincidence, this split is common and expected; the issues that smaller conferences face are the issues that open source face, etc. - all just permutations of the eternal struggle in tech: the corporate versus the personal, genuine passion versus creating stakeholder value.

This split is also often, at least in my experience as a Southerner, along geographic lines (& not just regional.) The bigger the conference, with more money and corporate backing, the more likely they are to rigidly stick to hubs. Sure they might even cycle regularly, but the fact remains that any time a conference goes for a non-hub venue it will be talked about, even if the city is large. (This year’s JSConf in Chesapeake Bay & SquiggleConf in Boston come to mind.)

Sometimes hubs are the truly practical choice, which is fair.

Sometimes conferences set out to try to establish the idea of a new hub, and while I can see the good intentions behind the idea, that goal ultimately buys into the narrative that tech is only a creature of cities and city folk.

The novelty of non-hub cities and the near invisibility of everywhere else builds onto the false narrative underpinning the most corporate end of the conference spectrum, and a lot of ways the current cultural narrative about tech itself; that is that tech is something separate, a marvel only found in its purest form in the pre-agreed upon tech hub, its access guarded for only those privileged enough to attain. Community conferences are then, at least in my opinion and experience, events that express the complete opposite: that tech is for everyone, that expertise can be found anywhere and learned by anyone. *

With little to no visibility, whether corporate or cultural, smaller conferences run into any number of problems, most easily solved by money. Small conferences sadly cannot sustain themselves on good vibes alone, or at least not for long. What is left after more than makes the effort worth it though: the connections and memories made.

steel yourselves

Now for the heartwarming stuff.

After thinking about what to say when it comes to the social aspect of community confs my heart-brain connection dug up one of my favorite quotes from James Baldwin: "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world...". I know, I know, not super heartwarming immediately but stick with me.

No matter how many small confs I've been to the ease and depth of connection with people always surprises me. Instead of talking like you're quoting your resume, the smaller groups and more intimate settings always create real conversations, conversations that are often totally honest about the shitty parts of the tech industry and/ or personal careers. You might go in thinking what you're going through is unprecedented only to find through the brave act of vulnerability that it's not. This can be as big as abuse and as small as an acknowledgement that a certain syntax in some programming language is very hard to grasp.

This ease of vulnerability and the overall lack of giving a shit about profit are the perfect environments for some of my favorite kind of talks.

The first category of talks that I love are those that resurrect the spirit of the old web, the wild west web that a ton of us either watched be born or grew up with. The old web was weird, delightful, and mostly unmarred by capitalism. Hell, my own talk encouraged folks to try to revive some of that fun.

Is it nostalgic? Honestly yeah, but I don't think that's a reason to dismiss concerns about what has changed and what we have lost over the decades. As far as gaining back those good parts are concerned, there have thankfully always been voices advocating for the return of a more personal and democratized web. Those voices, talks of the kind included, have helped me maintain a hope that some measure of clawing back a larger space for ourselves is possible.

The second category is decidedly cyberpunk in the traditional sense, but only in the context of the absence of universal American healthcare. These talks (and yes I've seen multiple of them) involve stealing back a little bit of health agency, which in a country where all aspects of your health, even down to the information, are commodities, is very punk. This is not to say that you should go rogue & distrust medical professions, but rather to point out that for-profit healthcare has in many ways alienated us from information about our own bodies or those of loved ones. A classic example is DRM limitations on medical device software where access to your own medical data has been made into a subscription. What if something like your blood sugar wasn't locked behind a certain brand and its app? What if you could make your own utility to calculate a normalized dosage over time, based on what you've been prescribed, of an IV medicine or supplemental material?

The last category of talks is new to me, but I am sure has been represented in small community confs before: talks that deal with the reality of the toll tech work can take on mental health. Again another example of that environment of vulnerability condensed into a format for the well-being of all.

Even though the tech ecosystem is not at all kind to small community conferences, I’d rather love, cheer, support and eventually lose them than never have them happen at all because their impacts cannot be understated. Inevitably a work-weary someone will remember why they got into tech in the first place, some newcomer will realize how welcoming a community can truly be and, most importantly, everyone will, at some point, be reminded of tech’s original purpose: that it is a tool to improve the human condition, not just a thing that makes money.

* this is of course a simplification, material concerns still apply at an individual level. I am very often limited by them.

Note: this reflection is not meant to be a prediction or pessimistic take on any specific community conf, and especially not about the one that inspired this; it is just an acknowledgement that many do tend to be sadly short-lived.