Aug 18, 2011

So Where's the Fall MySQL Community Conference?

Last week Percona announced plans to sponsor the Percona MySQL Conference in Santa Clara in April 2012.  It is meant to replace the O'Reilly conferences of previous years.  The announcement led to some reasonable questions, for example from Giuseppe Maxia.  These and other online posts initiated a thoughtful exchange of views about the pros and cons of Percona's conference announcement by various members of the MySQL community.

Not everyone agrees with what Percona is doing.  However, you have to give Peter, Baron, and others at Percona credit for taking the risk to organize a replacement conference.  It's a big financial commitment to rent space in Santa Clara.  The conference will be a huge amount of work, much of it quite thankless.  Even so I imagine it might be tempting for some people to try to organize an anti-conference just to spite Percona, much as Percona did at the MySQL Conference in 2009.  This would be a mistake.

Here is a better suggestion.  Why not put the energy into organizing a Fall 2012 MySQL Community Conference in Europe?   Make it somewhere pleasant like Barcelona or Verona and everybody will want to go.  Two solid conferences in different locations at opposite ends of the calendar would benefit the MySQL community at all levels and make it possible for more people to attend.  For those of you who want to grow the community, it's time to stand up and be counted.  Let's get another conference off the ground.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

+1 to a Barcelona conference

Cédric said...

+1 for a fall 2012 MySQL Community Conference in Europe !

Anonymous said...

I love mySQL! And I +1 a conference!

also! I dig the Asterix & Obelix image you chose :P

Medina said...

I agree with the Barcelona idea.

Kris said...

+1 to a Barcelone conference

Baron said...

I love Barcelona. The problem is, it's EXPENSIVE. And when we had a company meeting there, we had a devil of a time finding a place for it, plus when we did, nothing worked -- wifi, etc. I was annoyed at how poor the infrastructure was in both the venue and the hotel. We even have a Barcelona expert (Ewen) among our ranks. So although I'd love to go back to visit, I'm not sure the logistics of a conference are easy to pull off there :-(

I am making a note of it as a potential place to travel with Percona Live, though. Maybe on a larger scale we could actually get a lower cost per person and better facilities.

Robert Hodges said...

Hi all, I can't speculate on how hard or easy it would be to set up in Barcelona but it is a venue for *many* international conferences including some that are quite large. In addition to being an interesting city for visitors it is easy to reach by air and rail. Rome might also be a possibility--it has similar properties.