Hello! There will be a big IT conference here in Moscow in the end of May. It's rather interesting because it's actually a "superconference" — 6 different tracks on different languages/technology stacks. The website in Russian is here: http://devconf.ru/
We (Andrew Shitov and myself) take part in its organizing committee and also curate the Perl track. We also give talks ourselves. We prefer to think of Devconf as a conference for experienced developers who are open and eager both to share their knowledge to people outside of their community and borrow from technology stacks they don't use. We are going to have talks about modern PHP for Java and Perl developers, about modern Perl for Pythonistas and Rubyists et cetera. Of course there will also be a lot of other technical talks. Committee has planned 6 full-time tracks for two days and around 1000 attendees, mostly from Russia but also Ukraine and Belarus. The majority of talks will be in Russian but we'll have several in English and a synchronous translation service will be available for those attendees who are not proficient enough. We managed to invite Carl Masak and Piers Cawley to give talks on Perl 6 and modern Perl 5 respectively. We also tried hard to choose talks which are less "yapcy" and more accessible for people outside of our cozy little echo chamber :) Our track is going to compete for attention with PHP, Python, ASP.NET and Ruby tracks which have talks from several core developers of PHP, MySQL, ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails. What I would like is to hear advices on making our part great and successful. Do you think it's important to set up a booth? To invest in swag? To show off software? To advertise end-user products instead of technologies? Sell things? Collect donations? Record talks ourselves and share them? Pay more attention to quality of talks? Advertise above-average Perl developers' salaries? :) Here's a wiki-page with the list of our planned activities I created: http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?events_2010_devconf_ru Thanks in advance. This is our chance to talk to ~1000 web developers. That's why we would like to do our best. -- Alex Kapranoff.
