 Next up, we have Kerry Miller and Jeremy Forrest. They're going to talk about running your own conference, and they run OS fields in Seattle, and they're going to talk about their experiences. I don't know if you've heard, but this is the last Mountain West, and I have actually had some people ask me why we're closing it, why we're not doing it anymore. And by we, that's the royal we, it's just me, and that's why we're closing. But I love this. This is the 10th year, for a decade of my life. We have met here in the spring, and we have met as Rubyists and had awesome talks and got to talk to each other, and I want to do this again next year, right? I just don't want to run it. It's time for someone else to step up and to organize a conference and to do this again. And I hope that there's someone here in the room or watching the video who will take up this mantle and will move it forward. Here's some talk, why not continue the Mountain West name. And that's intentional on my part, that I don't want any comparisons. That for me, Mountain West is a way for me to relive RubyConf 2005. And show of hands, who was at RubyConf 2005? Three people, right? And so, well, four with me. And anyways, that's why it is the way it is, is because I'm chasing what it meant to me. And everybody in this room has a different experience of what touches them about the conferences that they go to. And so, if someone else organizes a conference, it's going to have a different feel. People are going to react to it differently. And that's what I'm looking for. That's what I want to happen. So that's why we're closing it. We're no longer going to do it anymore. This is the last one. And I would really just like to see someone do something next year because I love coming down to Salt Lake and doing this. I'm happy to help, but I'm not going to do it. So that said, this is the third time that we've tried to get Carrie here on stage, and life has intervened two other times. But this time, she's here. And Jeremy is her partner. And also Jeremy, which we didn't really invite him. He kind of just showed up. But he's super cool. And I like to listen to everything he says. So yeah, so thank you guys for coming. Thank you. And I look forward to what you guys are going to say. I'm going to touch this, but I'm going to be super shocked. The shock is real. The shock is real. You could see it with electricity in action. We also can't point our mics at each other. Oh, that's going to be rough. I have no shoulder cannon to see that. Carrie and I are going to laugh at our own jokes for most of this. So I hope that's OK. So formal introductions. Thank you, Mike. My name is Carrie Miller. I'm a developer at GitHub based out of Seattle. This is my really good friend. I'm Jeremy. I'm also a developer and a teacher. I am teaching at Ada Developers Academy right now. A year long non-profit tuition free school for women and underrepresented groups in tech. As Mike said, this is actually the third time he's asked me to come and speak here at Mountain West. The last two times, something came up like in the week ahead of time. It's me and my family or whatnot. And I couldn't make it. So when Mike finally invited me again, I'm just like, yes. I am there. And when I was trying to think about what I wanted to talk about and I heard it was the last Mountain West, I'm like, I really want to talk about this idea that I've been percolating with that is running a conference was a lot of fun. And it was a little bit scary because I had no idea what I was doing. And none of us really did, except for Jeremy. And I said, well, I can't possibly give a talk that I've never given before without bringing Jeremy along on the journey, so. Yeah, before, well, we're gonna talk about our conference open source and feelings before I moved to Seattle and got that off the ground. I was in Pittsburgh where we organized Steel City Ruby for a few years. I think a few folks, anybody go to Steel City Ruby when it was a thing? I know Aaron did, but Carrie did. Yeah, that's true. So I came to Seattle. I knew I wanted to do more organizing and we came up with the ridiculous name and got it going. Speaking of ridiculous names, I don't think it's fair that Aaron gets to show his pets. So this is my pet, this is TJ Higgins, JSD. That's his actual official registered name. People ask me what the TJ stands for and I say, well, it stands for TJ Hooker. And then people say, well, where did the Higgins come in? I'm like, well, Higgins was the butler from Magnum PI. Clearly, I mean, it's so obvious. That's where the name comes from. But also TJ, it stands for lots of things like trash junkie, trash jockey, all sorts of fun things, depending on how I feel about him that day and what he's rooting around in the alley with. Fair. This is my dog, this is Rosa. She doesn't have a fancy name, she's just Rosa. She's my best friend and really the best thing about knowing me I'm worth hanging out with so that you get to hang out with Rosa. So we are two of the members of the organizing committee of open source and feelings. The first one took place last October. It's been a whirlwind this winter. Last October in Seattle. And we're primarily focused on conversations and inquiries into the intersection of technology and the humanities. What does that mean? It means that hard talks are welcome. It's primarily a soft talk conference about where does technology actually enter our lives and how does it interact with how we live, who we are and how we interact with others. So we had a lot of great talks on community organizing, civics, open source software and government, how to run teams, how to run yourself, all those sorts of conversations. And the CFP is open for the 2016 event by the by. So if that sounds interesting to you, head on over to osfields.com. We'd love to hear from you. We also have early supporter tickets, which are priced at three times the normal ticket price. So rush right down and get in on that. Now that's a little weird, right? Like early bird tickets, you're supposed to get a discount, right? You can say it, that's a little weird. It's a little weird. But what we decided was we said, you know what? The people who are most excited about this conference are also the ones who can afford to come. You know, like people in this room who have jobs and everything and want to come and that extra money we use to help pay for speakers to come in, to have that early seed money that you're gonna need, as well as to manage to keep our ticket price low. We managed to put on a two day technical conference for 200 people where our baseline ticket price was $55 a head. And some people said, that's probably a horrible conference. What kind of conference could you do for $55? And people really always want to see our spreadsheets and stuff. And we're gonna talk a little bit about how we kept that cost so low through this idea of the minimum viable conference. Do you want me to? Sure. I don't know your cues. Jeremy asked me to join the organizing committee and this is kind of like, I'm like, yeah, this is gonna be horrible, but let's do it. It's gonna be a lot of fun. And we had no real idea of where we were gonna go. But we recruited some people. And so when we say we, we're gonna say we a lot during this presentation. It wasn't just Carrie and I. We had an entire team and we're gonna talk a lot about those team dynamics. And this is what conference organizing really looks like. You think it'd be like really fun and energetic and you get to meet all the people and do all the things. And really it's a lot of coffee and a lot of early mornings. Yeah. Yeah, this was us meeting for breakfast right before like 7 a.m. before an 8 a.m. Registration, so. So we do wanna like recognize the other folks that made open source and feelings possible last year. So besides Carrie and myself, we had Strand McCutcheon, Brie Dodson, Utah Kate Newman, Christina Hirtberg and Whitney Rose Levis. And I'm sorry, Christina, if I butchered your name. No, I think you landed it. Did I? Yeah. I practiced all morning, Hirtberg. We have a couple of new organizers this year. Brenna Flood is joining us as well as Mixolidia Gatro and I hope that I said that right, Mixolidia. It's funny, like we know people by their Twitter handles and maybe first names and I just never say people's last names out loud. We kinda don't need them anymore. No, you really don't. Really don't. Okay, so first things first. First things first. What's up? Serious time. All right, let's focus. I didn't power pose, that's the... You didn't power pose? Nah. Dang. The first thing you wanna figure out when you're gonna get into this is ask yourself the question, why do you actually want to run a conference? And so when I wanna think conference here, it could be anything. It could be a meetup. It could be a lunch and learn at your company. It could be a summit or a full-blown conference. Why do you wanna do it? Is it because you feel obligated to because it's a chore? Or are there these larger reasons that you perhaps wanna build your community out? You wanna give something back. Or maybe you want to become involved but you don't know how. Your skills might not be in the things that we normally think of as contributions to open source software. And trust me, as a GitHubber, I know a lot about contributions right now. Green dots. I know exactly how important those green dots are. So this is kinda like get those green dots of participation within your community by doing stuff that leverages your skills, your time and the energy that you can bring to the problem. And so when you start to think about why you want to do the conference, write it down, create a mission statement for what kind of conference you wanna make. So I was able to rattle off that OS feels blurb at you pretty quickly because I practiced it quite, quite a bit. You know, it's the elevator pitch of like, what's your startup about? What's your project about? What's your conference about? And we got there because we wrote it down and we kept writing it down and trying to refine it amongst ourselves. And this came in handy for a number of reasons, not just so that we could pitch to sponsors and contributors, potential speakers. But so that we could look at any decision that we were about to make about the conference and say, does that serve our goal? Right, so our mission is not the code of conduct or anything like that. It's a statement of our ideas and our values, what we're trying to accomplish. They're the bullet points that we can refer back to when we're making decisions. Is this thing that we are doing or not doing ultimately gonna help or hurt the organizing effort? Think of that sort of blur that you're gonna write as the very first unit test that you're writing about your conference. Everything can be tested against that for truth. So, step one, well, step two, step nine? How many steps have we had? Okay, so you need a location. The location is extremely important and you need to find a venue that complements your audience and your mission goals. The venue that you are in is an important actor in the conference experiences. It influences the kind of people you're going to attract. It influences the kind of talks that you're going to hear and it's going to influence the conversations that happen in the space. I really like the venue that we are in because there are several distinct locations where people can congregate and have conversations between talks. That's extremely important. Take all those things that you think are going to be important about your venue and make a list. And then as you begin to collect data on venues, visit them, email them, look them up. You're gonna wanna compare them against that checklist. And so that's a link to ours, the osfields.com slash checklist. And we evaluated maybe a dozen or so venues. Seattle's a big city. Before settling on this, the Broadway Performance Hall in Capitol Hill. It's to give you an idea of some of the stuff that we think about when we are evaluating a venue. I pulled a few things off that checklist. So there's accessibility concerns. This is very nuts and bolts. Are there necessary stairs for people to get around? Are there elevators for the folks who can't or aren't comfortable taking stairs? Similarly, wheelchair, entry and seating, something to think about. Audio-video capabilities as it turns out, doing all of this is surprisingly complicated. Is it built in or do you have to provide it? If it's built in, is there someone at the venue to support it? Are there screens? Are there mics? Is there mixers? How's the public address? Do they have built-in recording capabilities? Are they gonna be interfaced with a group like Confreaks? Are there adapters for laptops? Or do you need to provide your own? These are all just a mountain of little data points. And each one you can satisfy or figure out early will just help you make those decisions later. And then there's things like catering. If you're gonna feed people, many venues have preferred or required caterers to work with. So by researching a venue, you will invariably end up researching caterers. So what are the rules in the venue? Do they even allow food? Do they have space for food? Do they have a preferred caterer, a place to set it up? Do you have to get a banquet license? This list gets long. So we published ours and I hope you take a look at it. So once you've got a venue... You gotta get some money. You gotta get paid. Because people gotta get paid. There's one truth in life. I think Wu-Tang summed it up really nicely. Everyone's got to... At the end of the day, these bills have to get paid. And so everything that you add to your conference comes with a dollar cost. And if it doesn't come with a dollar cost, it's gonna come with a time and headache cost. You gotta make those sorts of things. And so you end up having to go and find sponsors. Even if you don't want to have a lot of sponsors, you need some seed money. And asking sponsors is really, really hard. Anyone hearing what you were in a youth group or your kids are in youth group, you had to go door-to-door and selling things? Girl Scout cookies. Yeah, cookies or popcorn. It was wrapping paper for me. I don't know why. Wrapping paper. That was weird. It was Vermont, I don't even know. Well, I always feared when I knocked on the door that they were just gonna yell at me. But people are usually pretty nice. A lot of times they are gonna say no. They're very polite when they say no. But they do say no a lot. They do. And so you have to kind of just get used to saying no and accept that it's nothing personal. They just don't have the budget. So make yourself a spreadsheet of everybody you'd like to ask. Make a spreadsheet of everybody who you've seen sponsor other conferences. Make a spreadsheet of every single local dev shop, design firm from the smallest to the biggest. Consultancies. Meetup group. Yeah. University group. And just spam the world. Spam the world. It also helps to really get creative with sponsorship at this point because some companies are just fine writing you a check for five grand. And we love those companies. Here you go. They make it easy. Other times companies might say no. And you can kind of come back and say, well, later on we're doing other sponsorship things. For example, we're gonna have a coffee bar in a barista and that's gonna cost us $1,200. Would you like to attach your name to it? So it could be, you know, the coffee bar as sponsored by Instructure. Similarly, like last year we had New Relic who specifically donated some money for the Travel Assistance Fund. Like our initial ask from them was a classic sponsorship and they were a little wishy-washy on it. So we went back to them and had a conversation about what they would find valuable for their money. And they said like, if it's in your mission to serve these communities, show us how our money's gonna be put to work. And by doing that, they wrote us a check and we were able to bring in some speakers that otherwise we would not have been able to. And Jeremy will talk a little bit later about how you make a budget and what you put on that. But having that budget, again, that he's gonna talk about, to show to your sponsors ahead of time, you can sort of gain some confidence, especially if you're a new first-time organizer or a first-time event because you have no track record, right? You're just some random person who's asking for money. And that can be really, really hard without having something to kind of back it up to say, no, look, I'm actually doing this. So you've got a venue, you've got a mission, you've got a little bit of sponsor maybe, you really gotta protect your investments. And so this is the nuts and bolts of what you need to do as an organizer to make your conference feasible, a reality. And I apologize, but there are absolutely no jokes in this section, I'm sorry. So this is the only joke you get. Okay, so serious business time. If you're going to do this, you need to make an LLC. You need to make an LLC because it'll let you do three very important things. It'll let you take other people's money, it will let you spend that money, and it will provide you a modicum of protection should something go terribly wrong. The LLC becomes the entity that's liable in case things go really wrong. So making an LLC is really easy. You can do it all online. It's a couple of forms for the state, a couple of forms for the federal government and you get everything that you need. So now that you've got an LLC, go hire an accountant. This is pretty important and I didn't do this and yeah, I should have known better. So follow up with the tax accountant in your area, earmark some money for them early because they will repeatedly and patiently remind you of all the little nitpicky stuff that the government requires. Depending on your location and plans, you may have to do things like collect and pay sales tax, use tax, amusement tax, income tax, they'll find some way to tax your income. So if you're not a tax professional, please go hire one, please, please, please. You're gonna need bank accounts and as soon as you have that federal tax ID for the LLC, muster up some patience and take a sandwich and go to the bank. It turns out that opening a bank account for a small business is a whole lot different than opening a bank account for a personal checking account. It took me three tries to get it right. Maybe you're a better business person than I am, but it's really important to have separate locations for that LLC money. It removes any cloudiness over where money went or who it went to. If it's a conference expense, it's paid with conference money from the LLC bank account, documented in the budget and there's a clear expectation on how money enters and exits the system. Also, if you do this and you do it well, your accountant will think you're super cool and that feels good. So, in pursuit of the minimum viable conference, I asked our first sponsor, the illustrious Star Horn over at Honey Badger for my Seattle friends, what he needed from us to be able to write us that sponsorship check and his answer was a tax ID and a mailing address. So being the software developer I am, I did the absolute minimum amount of work to pass that test and got Star a tax ID and a mailing address. He cut me a check and we were off to the races. As it turns out, that was not everything that I needed to do in order to safely take money from other businesses. Most cities and states have business licensing requirements and even though we had zero interest in turning a profit, the city of Seattle expected us to act like a business. That means getting a business license, registering with a department of revenue probably other stuff I am forgetting. I am a terrible business person. So find someone knowledgeable, pay them to help you and heed their advice and finally like a shout out to my CPA, Patrick at CPM, CPA in Seattle. So nice. Patrick at CPM, CPA in Seattle. We picked them because they're next door to Kerry's house. So it worked out great. Yeah, it was really pretty standing. Yeah, he was really surprised. Like, you don't want to make any money? Like, nah, dude. Like, not a penny. He's like, all right, we can work with that. And like a good accountant, he's already given us several tips so that we don't have to pay taxes next year. It turns out when you have money left at the end of the year, you have to pay taxes on that. So spend all your money. That's my professional advice to you. So every venue I've worked with, whether it was Steel City, Ruby, open source and feelings, other stuff I've done, they've had a clause in their contract requiring the LLC to secure event insurance. And this is a liability policy that protects the venue. It doesn't protect you, it protects the venue. If something goes wrong, somebody slips and falls on stage or... You all riot and tear up the seats. Yeah, please don't do that. Yeah, don't do that. So to set this up, you'll need 20 minutes, a telephone and probably $100. This was refreshingly inexpensive. It was wholly mundane, super simple. And I was like, I'm really good at this. All of a sudden, I'm an amazing business person. This was definitely one of the things that we learned that you can throw money at and make it go away. Absolutely, absolutely. We picked our insurance provider because the name made me laugh. It's triple, triple and triple. So this is how we made all of our decisions. Our two-day single-track conference for about 300 people cost $90 to meeting fully insure. So this is a little thing, but it's in your venue contracts. So watch out for it. Figure out what those minimums are and call triple, triple and triple to help you out. Serious business here. Serious business. Remember, serious business. So all of this plays to the fact that money is an unfortunate side effect of conference organizing. It was never our goal setting out to turn a profit. But money just kind of happens. It's the currency. So when you get started, you have no idea how much anything costs and that's totally okay. It's in front of a blank spreadsheet and invent some numbers. A half hour of research will get you pretty far. It'll get you 80% of the way there around what venues cost in your area, how much transportation is, t-shirt printing, all that stuff you might be interested in. This is what the headers look like on our budget spreadsheet. The way this works is I put each item that either costs or makes money in one column and the next column is my best guess on what that might cost, educated or otherwise. You have to start somewhere. The third and fourth columns are blank for a long, long time. That's when I actually figure out what that thing costs. That's where it goes. And the third column and the fourth column is when I have to have that money. So tally up everything that either brings in money or costs money and you've got a functional budget. It's not meant to be a line item ledger of expenditure. It's a high level of counting, again, of how money is entering and exiting your accounts. There were more than a few decisions at OSNF last year that hinged on the when money was available, more than the how much money we needed. It was things like, yeah, we could, we'll be net positive either way, but if we buy this item today, we won't have money in the account to pay the vendor tomorrow and that's more pressing or there's a contract in place. So have this budget open in front of you during every organizer meeting. Decisions should be couched in their support of the organization mission against the available budget. Yeah? Okay. All right. Serious business done. Well, except that I have been standing over here shifting back and forth from foot to foot. And I gotta deshock myself. Okay, go. You have to understand, I used to be an electrician, a stage electrician. I am afraid of electricity. Dang. Serious. I saw that. Ow. We should have put a camera over here. That'd be more entertaining than our slides. You might best rock look. Oh. No, it's not really that good. Choosing presenters. This is the fun part. Sometimes there's a mistake and you get presenters. But before you go down this road, because this is really like when you start to really define like, what is our conference about? Like what are we gonna do? Up to now, you've just been like dealing with like these nuts and bolts issues. You really wanna kind of choose your format early on because that's gonna tell you a lot of things. Are you single track? Are you double track? Can your facility handle a double track? Do you wanna do a wave, a so-called wave format where you do like keynotes at breakfast, lunch, and at the end of the day, and then go off and do multiple rooms? I mean that has its own complications. It increases a lot of your costs, but you know, all these sorts of considerations you wanna take into account. And one of the things that we found was we really liked doing a single track because we wanted people to be present at the event and participating in the community conversations that were happening. So single track it is. Once you kind of get that, it's time to do your CFP. And a CFP kind of, I like launching things, but I always kind of get this sort of vibe where I'm like I'm about to press the button. And it's kind of risky because it's the first time that you're actually really broadcasting to the world, this is our mission, this is who we are, and this is what we're doing. And you're trying to get other people to buy into that mission, not to give you money, to give you something far more valuable, their time. So when you're inviting speakers, you wanna really focus on giving as much information as possible upfront. When you're inviting people, it doesn't hurt to ask if you've decided that you want to invite a few people. But understand that they are giving you their time and effort. It takes approximately, at least for myself, it takes around an hour and a half per minute of the presentation. So for this 45 minute presentation, Jeremy and I have put in about seven downers. Seven minutes, oh. Don't give away the secrets. So they're gonna be putting in their time and that's uncompensated and there's almost no amount of honorarium or nice things that you can do for them that would make a direct compensation for that time. So treat them nice and be as open to working with them as possible. If they say yes, but I can only do it on the second day or whatever, that really helps. You're invited speakers, if you choose to have invited speakers, can act as the tent pole of your conference. They can really be that early sort of promotional thing that you're gonna talk about. Like we got these four people and now we need more talks. Come on, people. They can also really open up their own communities. OS Fields is not a Ruby conference. But most of the organizers are Rubyists. So we said, if we invite just the people that we know are good, we're only gonna invite other Ruby developers. So we have to like really expand our search and we lucked in to making some good connections with people in the Node community and the Python community to say who should we be inviting from your communities that can speak to the topics that we wanna hear about. And so Mining those connections got us in touch with a couple of people who we invited and they came and it just opened up OS Fields to a broader community than we would have been able to reach otherwise and the talks were amazing. Yeah, definitely. And a lot of those people also turned into being really great sponsorship leads as well. Not in a direct quid pro quo situation, but their company said, oh, you're speaking at such a conference. Well, let's throw $1,000 that way to help out. So keep that in mind. If you're actually gonna run a CFP, it's pretty standard off the shelf. We use a tool called Blinder that Jeremy wrote for Steel City. I wrote software and people use it if you can believe that. And Blinder, as you can tell by its name, keeps all of the demographic information that we gather and we actually do ask for quite a bit. It keeps it all blind or hidden from the people we're gonna be reviewing and we have a whole system for that. And that way like kind of reduces our inherent biases towards people who are well known or any sort of like other bias that might creep into our decision making. We also offer as much upfront information as we can about what the conference is and what our expectations are. The maximum length of a talk is, for example, for us 40 minutes and these are the kinds of topics we want to hear. Here's our code of conduct and we expect all of your slides and presentation material to conform to it. We also publish a wish list of around 50 different talk titles that we just randomly dreamed of. Like, wouldn't it be great if someone offered a talk with this title? We just compiled all of those into this one document which we are publishing. You can find it from thecfposfields.com and a lot of speakers have come back to us and said, wow, that's really great. I wanted to pitch. I didn't know what to talk about but I got an idea off your list and that helped us sort of like kind of direct the shape of the submissions that we're getting and help us make a better conference for people. Oh boy, okay. So earlier I told you that the section on nuts and bolts and setting up business stuff was the least fun. I lied to you. I lied to you so I could make the joke with the GIF and then you didn't laugh so it's okay. The hardest thing is- They were laughing on the inside, Jeremy. No, they weren't. It's the lights. You can't hear them because of the lights. Oh, I can't hear them because of the lights. Yeah. They don't tell you that at speaker training. They had speaker training? I did. Okay. So I'm bantering with Carrie to avoid talking about this because it's kind of an uncomfortable topic for me but I'm gonna do it because it's important. Like any other endeavor, the real challenge is in the relationships. Every organizer brings with them a unique vision of the event. They bring with them their own skills, their own anxieties, their own goals and balancing that is complicated. When we started this thing, Carrie and I and everyone else, we approached it like a bunch of open source software developers starting a new project. We brought our understanding of how to do work and applied it to the task at hand. Our organizer meetings were essentially sprint planning and Slack became this asynchronous swirl of half conversations, stand up style check-ins and cat gifts. In our day job as developers, certain folks are empowered to steer the ship. Hierarchy is usually formal. You've got project managers, team leads, dev managers and the like. And those power structures come with their own problems but in their absence, developers can spin out of control indefinitely. For OS and F, there were difficulties with decision making, accountability against those decisions and communication breakdowns. It totally slowed our efforts and given that we were 100% volunteer driven, how are we to hold folks accountable for missing a deadline or not completing a task? As those months wore on, it became apparent that our de facto mode of consensus building for decision making was not going to work. There simply was not enough time. So folks just started doing things. They started taking chances. Carrie and I designed and ordered attendee badges without involving the other organizers. We just did it one afternoon. Utah pushed ahead with turning all of the restrooms in the venue gender neutral. I'm pretty sure I asked someone if it was okay if I gave all of my students free tickets to the conference and I couldn't tell you though what they said or who I asked. Acting in this manner had consequences. Relationships were strained and damaged and meetings grew tense. Asking someone about the status of a task often resulted in you becoming the new owner of that task. It wasn't fun and this thing, this organizing effort became a chore and it became a job and a necessity to see through. We did, we saw it through. It was equal parts of grit and luck. We kept the promises that we had made to our attendees, our presenters and each other. About a month after the conference, we made one good decision. We had a formal retrospective. We brought in and paid a professional facilitator to lead discussions around the organizing experience. Our goal was to identify the things that had gone right, the things that had gone wrong, how to maximize the former, minimize the latter. And I want to share with you the things that came out of that retrospective. So maybe you don't have to go through some of the stuff that we went through. Oh, that was the slide that was supposed to be up during that entire speech. So those are the badges that we didn't ask anybody about. Aren't those great badges? Yes, but we really should have talked to people before we spent their money. Yes, we should. So take away number one, have an organizer code of conduct. This is different than your events code of conduct. It's there for similar reasons to outline acceptable and unacceptable behaviors and the process for dealing with both. But it's tailored for a different audience. It's tailored for you as organizers. And this will provide the minimal formal structure you need to ground discussions and resolve disagreements. When Brie proposed this, that's Brie in the middle between Nat and Utah on the left with a big cheeseburger in her mouth. It shouldn't have been novel when Brie proposed it. It makes too much damn sense. And I'm kind of upset that we didn't come up with it earlier. You can read our organizer code of conduct at osfields.com slash organizer code of conduct. It's a really long URL. And it outlines our expectations for each other. It provides a framework for how we want to be treated, how we expect to be treated by each other. And it's all about being mindful. So part of adhering to that code of conduct is being mindful of everyone's communication preferences. Slack for us gave the impression that everyone was available all the time. And that's simply not true. Like people have lives and responsibilities. This is a volunteer effort. Some folks work in restricted environments and don't have slack on their work machines in the daytime. Other folks unplug in the evening to spend time with their family and so they're not going to respond to an email after 7. Our organizer code of conduct talked about the need to document and be aware of these preferences and respect them. Taking the time to document how someone wants to be communicated with, how someone wants to be talked to shows that you respect their boundaries and you're going to get a much better response. It's going to be timelier and it's going to be friendlier. Oh and I just, again, I really like in any sort of code of conduct not as the constitution or founding document or a set of rules like monopoly rules that should be gained. But they're tests. Any time you have a question about something you have a place to go and have a thing that you can go and have a discussion around no matter what it is. Right. Document your decision making. Write things down. Write things down. Or write down that you decided to write things down. Put that thing you wrote down about writing things down somewhere that all the organizers can see and give it an ominous title like this one. This page will help us remember decision points that we have made for the 2016 conference less than three. Tell yourself that if it's not in the decision list it's not decided. Tell yourself that if it is in the decision list then it is decided. And be specific with these. I'm going to give you some examples. This is not good documentation. We decided to run a CFP is a decision and I'm happy that she wrote it down but it should really look something more like this. Or it's got some specifics. We're going to use Blinder for our CFP again. We improve the list of questions, et cetera. It's got some details. And so while this is good this is definitely more better. These look like notes. I'm going to call out the things in green. They have names attached to them. They have dates attached to them. These become tasks. And it looks like notes and it is. They're notes but they're notes about decisions. And by attaching names to those decisions we introduce accountability. I'm a volunteer and if I can't get our CFP software up and running by three seven no one's going to fire me. But it will be something that we have to talk about at the next meeting. I'll feel some obligation to put the time in and get it done. Put my name on a task and I feel some ownership. It's both empowering and is the little bit of motivation I need to push through. It's attached to my personal sense of accomplishment and I don't want to let anybody down. That's a lesson we get right out of, you know, Kanban, like put your name on something to be responsible for. And in that spirit, Jeremy, I didn't call the venue by three 14 to talk about workshops. That's okay. That's okay. We can get ahold of Daryl when we get back. We just should talk about it at our next organizer meeting. Cool. See how we did that? And scene. Easy. Okay, here's a picture of my dog again because I forgot to replace this while we were editing the deck last night. So you want to empower people, especially your first-time organizers. Here's a story for you. As a signatory on the bank account, I became a bottleneck and a pressure point for a lot of decisions because if it involved money, which most decisions do, eventually it would filter through me. And that gave me a kind of implicit veto. If I disagreed with a decision, I could simply not write that check and it wouldn't happen. I would never do that, but the fact that I could, the fact that it was there, the fact that it was unstated had the same effect as if I was doing it. It effectively disenfranchised our first-time organizers and devalued their efforts. This year, my role is much the same, but I'm trying a new tactic. I'm hoping it will be more successful. Next year, maybe you'll have me at your conference and I can tell you whether or not it worked. But now at every meeting, I give a budget update and I frame it in terms of our budget or available budget. I used to say things like, yeah, go do the research and figure out how much that's gonna cost and let me know. That gives people nothing to work with and nothing would get done because they weren't sure how to approach the problem. Now I'm trying to ask questions like, do you think $700 is a reasonable budget for this? And they're still gonna tell me? I don't know. They have no idea how much a speaker's dinner costs or what a good rate on a facility rental is, but it gives them something to start with. It empowers them to figure out whether or not $700 is reasonable. It seems counterintuitive a little bit. It seems like I'm imposing a restriction, but people work well when they have boundaries. They work well when they have something that they can test. They'll come back to me and say like, yeah, for $700, we really can't do much, but if you give me $1100, we can do this. And assuming that we're having the conversation in the right tone with respect to our organizer code of conduct, it goes well and things get done so far. Yeah, so that's kinda how you get a lot of stuff done. When I came onto the project and joined the other organizers, one of the things that we kept talking about was, what do our favorite conferences do? Let's steal their good ideas and mash it all together and that'll be a good conference. So there were a lot of decisions that we could have made that we didn't because they simply didn't fit in with our mission. Again, like exploring the intersection between technology and humanity, but also the idea of we want it as many people to have access to this conference as possible. So that was one of the driving goals of how do we keep the cost as low as we can and got away with such a ridiculous, minimum viable shoestring budget conference. It meant that we did a lot of things differently. Wi-Fi, how many people have had good luck with Wi-Fi today? No burn on mine. No, and it's no shame. Wi-Fi is notoriously bad for a lot of reasons. It's so hard to do well. It's hard to do in a temporary location like this. If the venue has it, like they're not designed, they might be designed for an audience, but not an audience of us, right? I know I've seen all of y'all on Slack, a couple of you play in Destiny. I mean, come on, right? We're burning through that bandwidth really fast. It's also super expensive. We looked around and got a couple quotes before I just hung up the phone and stopped calling. The cheapest I got was $4,000 for two days. That's pretty expensive, right? Now, we're doing a conference with 200 people. That means it's gonna cost $20 a head to get Wi-Fi. That means our $55 ticket is now $75. I don't think $20 is gonna break people, but I'm also a senior software developer with 20 years of experience and I get paid pretty well. $20 might make the difference for somebody who's in their first, second, third year of college, somebody who graduated from a boot camp, but is looking for work. Maybe that makes the difference between them being able to find childcare for their kid and being able to attend. So that was something that we decided not to do. Now, after the conference, we did a questionnaire, which I thought was really great. I love this questionnaire. We sent one to all of our attendees and one to all of our speakers asking questions, like, what did you like? What didn't you like? What work did you work? Because we did do a lot of different stuff. And I had to say, maybe four or five people out of 200 got back to us and said, man, I really wish you had Wi-Fi. It's not tech conference without Wi-Fi. We're like, it's Seattle. Do you know what a coffee shop is? We counted the other day, I think there's 12 within a five block radius that I know personally have Wi-Fi because their Wi-Fi networks are in my computer. If you absolutely needed Wi-Fi, you could have gone and gotten it. And the other reason was that being on the internet is taking you out of the moment. And that's no dig. I know all of you are taking furious notes because you want to run your own conference. I appreciate that. But when you are in your laptop, you are outside of that moment. We wanted people to be present because we were having a lot of hard conversations about hard topics around feelings and community and identity. Next. Next. We didn't do an after party. We did do a speaker dinner. Usually speaker dinners, they're great. I really enjoy them. I get to talk to other speakers and we just kind of chill out. And like, we're all nervous no matter what it looks like up here. We're all super nervous, especially the night before. You know, we usually go out and there's like a bar tab and like a dinner. We didn't do that. We got a local consultancy to give us their office for the evening and we got take out from a local Indian restaurant and just like put it out on a table. And it cost us $176. Yeah, almost nothing. Now you take those same 25 people and you bring them to a really nice restaurant with a bar tab and that price is going up. So when you come to an after party, we had kind of the same idea. How many people are gonna be able to participate and are they gonna enjoy it? Is it going to add to their enjoyment of the conference? I think in retrospect, I do want to have done an after party. I do want to have done some kind of event that either like formally like releases us from the liminal space of a conference. You know, like, cause this is not the everyday. And as we're leaving to go back to our everyday, we should have some sort of recognition of we all were here and experienced something together as a community. We should celebrate that that happened. And now there is a transition back to normality. We ultimately decided not to for very practical reasons. We couldn't find a venue in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. We were hosting the conference that was affordable and accessible. And the sheer work in doing that and finding the venue, figuring out banquet licensing, getting food, making sure people could get to and from. It would have required the full-time attention of one of the organizers and nobody had the bandwidth. T-shirts and swag. I have an open source and feelings T-shirt. Jeremy has one as well. All of our speakers do because we decided that we wanted to get them. So we put together a small order for ourselves and printed them up and sent them to the speakers. Doing them for 200 people though was going to be on the order of $10 to $15 with the range of the quotes that we got with the vendors that we were looking at. We simply didn't have enough in the bank at that moment to write the deposits that we needed because of the lead time that you needed for printing shirts. And also, again, it was going to add $10 to $15 to the ticket price. And also, like, I don't know about you all, but I have a ton of conference shirts already. I really don't need any more. My wife is constantly saying, like, really? You need a RubyConf shirt from four years ago? Yes. Absolutely. How else will people know I was there? That said, we didn't do T-shirts. We didn't really do a lot of swag, but we did a little bit of swag. One of our sponsors, Sticker Mule, donated some shop credit for us. And we got these awesome buttons and stickers made up, which turned into a really great promotional. Yeah, so... Does anybody want a button? If you want a button, I can... These are limited editions. These are all that we have left. This is all that exists. Ooh, that sounded great. I can't see anybody because of the lights, but... And the venue staff advised against me just whipping them randomly into the audience. So I'm not going to do that either. Do you have liability insurance? Just be fine. Okay, cool, cool. We also got these sweet notebooks made up. I love this design and the cover. The only bad part about it was we couldn't get graph paper. I love graph paper. I asked for graph paper, and I didn't get graph paper. That was disappointing. This is all that are left. This is all that's left. After this, they are gone. Yeah, no, not 400. 300. 300. We got 300. We got a lot. And these are all that are left. If you would like a notebook, come find us. I've seen these out in the wild in Seattle, like just people taking notes on them in coffee shops, or one of my students pulled one out the other day. And I didn't even know they weren't a student of mine or of our academy when they were at the conference. And she still had her notebook. And that was a really cool feeling, like seeing these out in the wild. So this is the last 10 that we have. So if you would like one, come find us. And I'll happily give you one until they're gone. The other thing is, and you probably noticed this outside today, sponsors bring a lot of their own swag. Yeah, they do. NPM brought this entire table of NPM branded socks. They were gone in five minutes. It was crazy. Vultures. People just descended on the table. Madness. Another one of our sponsors, Thomas Street, which is a design studio in Seattle, they made these stickers. They just showed up with a box of like 500 stickers. I had no idea. Do you mind? Yeah. This is their interpretation of what open source and feelings meant to them, or whatever their illustrator was. So we had a ton of swag, it turns out. And we didn't have to charge any of our attendees a single dime for it. Finally, catered meals. I'm noticing this at a lot of conferences now that I really love this. And I love that we're doing it here as well. Because catering a meal is hella expensive. And if you've ever planned a wedding, you know this. It's hard to get exact numbers of how many people, because people aren't going to show up, or they'll be there on one day, but not the other. And then you've got to deal with, I mean, like, five vegan meals and four gluten-free. I personally don't eat carbohydrates anymore. So maybe that's a problem. So that just gets pricier and pricier and more of a logistical headache. And again, that price increase of, say, it's $10 ahead for two days, so $20, that could be the difference. So let people take that same exact money and let them spend it the way that they want to spend it. I first saw Madison and Ruby do this. What they used to do is get local businesses had like a Madison box or something like that, like a gift certificate for $10. And they would give you one every day that you could go and spend it at local restaurants. But why do that? Let's cut out the middleman and just let people spend their own money on what they want to eat and manage their own dietary restrictions and budgets. So we did lunch leaders. Students from Aida Developers Academy volunteered to be a lunch leader. They would gather in the lobby and hold up a sign and the sign would say Indian or pizza or Russian dumplings. And having pre-scouted these restaurants, they had a good idea of how many people the restaurant could sit comfortably. So they'd gather that many people and off they went. This was awesome. It was so great. And more than a few people remarked that it was their favorite thing about the conference, having kind of these guides out into Seattle. We also deliberately picked a venue that was in one of the most interesting and vibrant, densest neighborhoods of Seattle, Capitol Hill. And it's also really the epicenter of a conversation that's happening in the city itself. As Amazon is growing and tech startups are coming in, a lot of the longtime residents of Capitol Hill are being pushed out. It's being sort of re-gentrified in a strange way. Capitol Hill has also for a long time been the neighborhood. It's where the nucleus of the LGBT community has been. And a lot of those folks are getting pushed out as well. So there's a lot of tension in that neighborhood between newcomers and old timers, new development, old development. And so like getting people out into the neighborhood and letting the neighborhood itself become part of the conference and part of those conversations around inclusion and exclusion was really rich and rewarding part of what we did. It made the neighborhood part of the conference. And we're looking forward to doing it again this year. We'll wrap it up. Let's wrap it up. This is the outro. This is the go forth and be awesome. Every talk needs this. Our hope is that you will use the information we presented here minus bad jokes to create similar efforts. And I don't really care what your conference is about. I just care that you care, that you care about something enough to pull together a group of strangers, organize and get them together to examine it, to celebrate it and improve upon it. Open source and feelings is a really silly name for something that ended up being pretty serious at times. The levity in the names and the jokes that it inspired exist to provide balance, to difficult conversations about burnout, isolation, homogeneity and discrimination. It was also a platform for joy, for finding a niche to call your own in a daunting industry or making, not just making space for, but appreciating and celebrating the contributions of diverse and inclusive teams and products. I can look back on what we did last year. I can look back at our successes and our failures and feel good about it. Our hypothesis around the minimum viable conference confirmed. Events like OSNF and Mountain West are important. They provide the opportunity to elevate ideas and voices that can improve our abilities, our understandings, our relationships, our workflows and more. As we work on 2016, I am confident in our ability to provide real, tangible, meaningful value to everyone involved, attendees, presenters, sponsors and my fellow organizers. All of these events, like every other product, come with a cost. These regional conferences are a labor of love, done because we believe in our collective ability to learn, teach, inspire and change things for the better. So whether it's technique or technology, code or communication, these events are our soap boxes that we need to move our industry forward. Thank you. While we're taking questions, where are our links? There they are. These are all the links that we mentioned during the talk. So if you're interested in learning more about OSNF, we're submitting to our CFP. We would absolutely love to hear from you. If you want to organize your own event, we'd love to hear from you. So please reach out to us. The question is how did we attract attendees? Can we talk about that a little bit? With honey, we put a little honey out in like a cardboard box. Primarily it was a lot of word of mouth but a lot of promotional stuff. We had in Utah Newman, we had an amazing Twitter person. She is great at social media and she did a lot of that, that's her social media outreach. We went to all of our speakers and we said, who should we be promoting to? What communities do you belong to? What groups, what mailing lists, what meetups? And I just made a big, giant spreadsheet. I had 70 or 80 different groups in it at one point and it included all the meetups for the Vancouver, Seattle, Boise, Portland region, all the mailing lists I'm on. And I basically just had a form letter that I said that I would like put out small announcements about it. I also reached out to, because I did a lot of this part of it, reaching out to local computer clubs at colleges, especially because we had student rate tickets as well, because at $55, we could almost give these tickets away. And we gave away a lot of tickets. We gave away a lot of tickets too. Yeah, we did. We also gave a half price ticket to everybody who proposed a talk, which we're doing again this year. So if you want a half price ticket, it's just a talk. And whether we accept it or not, we'll give you a coupon code for a half price ticket. Yep. And so that was just kind of like that sort of continual outreach and repetitive because not everybody's gonna see that one email that goes out or that one tweet that kind of scrolls by. So it was a lot of just being loud and putting yourselves out there continually. Of those 80 groups that I emailed, only two said, please don't ever email me or my group again. One of them was the Vancouver Scala Meetup and the other was the Vancouver Java Group Meetup. So I don't know what that says about those sorts of developers, but it might have even been the same guy, I don't know. There's nothing wrong with Java and Scala developers. No, I like. Oh, I love this question. So the question was we went with an LLC over a nonprofit like a 501C3 or something. We would love to do 501C3, but that is not a process for the faint of heart. It takes a couple of years and a fair amount of money. It is work, the requirements to do that. And then the requirements to maintain it were well outside the scope of what we could accomplish. Long-term, I would love to go that route. I'm hoping that we can grow this effort and do something that's a little more permanent in the Seattle area. Board of Directors reporting requirements at the federal level and the state level. Yeah, it's a real heavy lift. There are, that said, there are umbrella groups that exist solely for the purpose of small volunteer run events and groups can operate under the umbrella of that nonprofit. But now all of your money and funding is going through somebody else in another city who may or may not be an exact match with your particular mission. The Stumptown Syndicate in Portland is one example that does tremendously good work in the Portland area. And they serve as kind of the financial and administrative backbone of many community-focused groups. So if something like that was in Seattle, if you know of something in Seattle, I'd love to talk to them. Maybe we should be that in Seattle. I'd really love to be that in Seattle. If anybody wants to work on that with me, I'd love to talk to you too. The question was what the turnaway rate was from companies because we were not a nonprofit. Do you mean in terms of sponsorship? Yes, in terms of sponsorship. I think that we had, I wanna say a dozen sponsors in the end, and we probably were outreach to 60 to 70 companies, all told. Now a lot of those companies said no because our money is spent for the year. We were an event that was happening originally. We happened in October. And so our fundraising was happening between, from like, well, June you start, but all through that late summer and fall period. So it made sense that people had their 2015 budgets locked up. So I would say the rejection rate was maybe 20% was because of budgetary concerns and the rest was either we just didn't hear from them. It was like internet dating. You never hear from them again. They just disappear. So I don't know how much to attribute to not having that status. I think if we did have it, that would definitely be an improvement because they can get a tax break from that, as well as by the time we get that settled, we will be an established event with a track record. That was the hard thing. The first year was like trying to convince somebody to do it and luckily Star Honey Badger stepped up and wrote us a check. We love you Star. Yeah. Also, if we do get the nonprofit status, it will be able to change the groups we can outreach to. We can like look at beyond tech companies and tech community that could also benefit from open source but aren't directly tied into tech who may not be familiar with conference, specifically the role they play in their communities. So it would be a new population as well. So the question is, how do we attract good talent being a first year conference? Especially in the invited speakers. The invited speakers I think are really the key and Kerry's a very accomplished speaker and that helped a lot. No, like people, yeah. I mean, I've watched it happen. We're like walking down the street and we're like, that's Kerry Miller. I'm like, I know. So that's a ridiculous answer. The real answer is you mine your personal networks and so at least for us we did this because we love conferences, because we love what they've done for our community, our careers, our friendships and so we had personal contacts to mine and it seemed like each organizer had like two or three people that they were really itching to reach out to and they were people that I would have had no connection to. So I think it's you have a diverse organizing base of people who are a part of different communities than you because they're gonna have their own people they wanna talk to and you go to conferences whenever you can so you can meet these folks and you can send them an email like, hey, I saw you two years ago at RailsConf and I thought your talk was great. We're doing this thing and if you're interested I'd really love to talk to you. I think also that we had a real strong mission statement that we had crafted and we kind of refined and put the time into that. It became really easy for someone who got the like, please come speak at my event, here it is and like it's a hundred words. It's a real tight, tight hundred words. You should have that elevator pitched on, same thing, that really helped a lot. And people like doing this. Like if you give them a platform people have stuff to say. Karen and I had a conversation once and it was about like, why do we keep doing this? Like we were tired, we were exhausted and the answer that came up was like, we asked our communities like, what should we do with this enormous privilege that we have that we're gainfully employed that we're really good at our jobs that we're like at the right place, at the right time to make a good living, doing this really fun thing. Like what do we do with this? And the answer we got back resoundingly was build a platform for somebody else. So there's a lot of really great stories out there. There's a lot of really great people. If you give them a platform, they will stand on it. I think that's ultimately the most rewarding thing about doing it was that there wasn't, there was no moment of fame for us. I mean, a few of us got up on stage at the end but a bunch of us were off dealing with some crisis or something. There was no like, there was no like notoriety or real congratulations for us, except the fact that, you know what, like we created a structure for all of you to come and share and speak to each other and learn. And that was what made it awesome. It wasn't, we did all the things to take the roadblocks and the hassles out of the way of y'all having a good time. And that was really kind of the key in the end. Which by the way, like real shout out to you, Mike. This is an amazing event and doing it by yourself. I am beyond impressed, man, kudos. All right, Mike. So the question is, well, your last two sentences were like a really great summary. How do you show people, especially people who don't look like you or come from where you come from, that you are genuinely interested in what they have to say? Like how do you reach across to those communities that you are not a part of? And you used the keyword there. It's about being genuine and recognizing that you have faults and you have implicit biases and you will make mistakes and you will say dumb things and like that's okay. Sometimes you put your foot in your mouth and the goal is to let go of the defensiveness, acknowledge when you've done that and learn. And if you just repeat that process, you make inroads in communities that aren't yours. And they're a very nervous group, but eventually Python developers will learn to trust you and they will come to your conference. I married a JavaScript developer, so it's gonna happen. Thank you.