Lately I have been really interested in all of these web conferences all over the place talking about the latest trends and technology out there in my field of work. They seem like great events, which the leading “top dogs” of the industry speak, but its just one thing there expensive as hell!!!
I would love to go to something like An Event Apart. This conference has some of the most influential speakers of the web industry and will be in Chicago in August, it’s the first one I have seen so close to me over here in Michigan.
- Steve Krug
- Dan Cederholm
- Molly Holzschlag
- Andrew Kirkpatrick
- Cameron Moll
- Ethan Marcotte
- Jason Santa Maria
- Eric Meyer
- Jeffrey Zeldman
That is one great line up, but I will never be able to go and participate. The event is going to cost about $800. For someone like me, a young freelance web developer that hasn’t yet made it there in my career to be able to just blow $1k dollars to hear people speak. Its just not feasible. I know this is cheap compared to other conferences such as the Web 2.0 conference that cost something like $5k dollars WOW or a other conferences for other industries.
I think this contradicts everything that most of the speakers preach in their practices. They want everyone to hear the word of how great web standards are and they try to get as many people as possible to help create a better web.
Why limit this to only companies that can afford to send their employees or the other normal elite Developers that show up at every conference? Why not open it up to all of the developers and small businesses which are passionate about the web and follow what these people teach us in their books and blogs?
It seems to me that these presenters just go from conference to conference, most likely making tons of money off each one. Then we have to sit there and read in their blog about how good the conference was and all the things that were presented. We get the podcasts and get to listen to the important stuff anyways. Most of the time its stuff that I have already read about, but it would be cool for someone like me to be able to take part of these events, for the simple fact that I really do admire the presenters. They are what I hope to be one day, someone that makes a difference and has a passion for everything that is the internet.
Sure you could say the conference needs to be able to pay these presenters and keep the conference going and pay for the facilities but I doubt that it needs to cost $1k - 5k for each attendee. I may be wrong but it just annoys me that someone with as much passion and drive for the web that I have doesn’t get the chance to participate in such great events because someone puts a huge price tag on ideas they want everyone in the world of development to follow.
Basically these conferences are nothing more then to put money in the presenter’s pockets and to get corporations to start realizing they need to follow web standards to make the internet a better place. When in turn they will go back slap in some nifty little Ajax script and some cool new CSS effects inside of their crappy coded, non semantic, inaccessible and unusable website.