Re: On what we want to support: travel?

On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 04:42:56PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Adrian,
>
> > 2) My thoughts. I am writing this as an end user and as a member of the
> > Organizing committee of LinuxFest NW  (linuxfestnorthwest.org/). Last
> > year Jim Nasby spoke at LFNW, funded by his employer Pervasive. He was
> > the lone Postgres speaker in a conference that had a team of people from
> > MySQL and another team from Oracle. Oracle and MySQL are planning on
> > returning, Pervasive is out of the Postgres business. In my role as
> > organizer I would like to see Postgres represented, but money is short.
>
> Actually, we have a bunch of community in Seattle and in British
> Columbia ... how far is Bellingham?

FWIW, LFNW solicited folks on one of the lists (maybe this one?) and no
one else was interested or available (Josh D. was already committed to
something else).

I'd happily speak again next year, assuming that airfare is covered.
EnterpriseDB might cover it, but to be blunt, I don't think there's a
lot of commercial incentive for them to do so. My impression of LFNW is
that it was mostly folks who wouldn't pay for support, so if my travel
was covered it would essentially be a donation to the community. Which
rounds back to the question of how much importance the community places
on these things.

Personally, I think it would be great if we encouraged local users to go
and speak at these smaller conferences, especially because they are much
more likely to strike a chord with the attendees. Sure I could talk
about tuning a PostgreSQL database running on a quad opteron and a 500GB
storage array, but what's that mean to an audience that is largely
comprised of people who are just getting their feet wet in linux and
databases?

Part of encouraging that local participation is offering people who are
willing to talk some money to cover their expenses. The mileage charge
for someone 100 miles away to drive to LFNW would be about $80 (BTW, if
someone wants to do that and the FundMeister doesn't want to pay, I'll
foot the bill myself).

BTW, speaking of representation from the "competition", there were two
MySQL talks at LFNW, and a 2+ hour session on Oracle (equivalent to 2
talks). I think it would be great if people talked about how they're
using PostgreSQL on small projects that relate to what LFNW attendees
are likely to be doing.
--
Jim Nasby                                            jim@nasby.net
EnterpriseDB      http://enterprisedb.com      512.569.9461 (cell)