] Just some of the themes you'll find reflected in this
] year's ETech program are: The grand vision of web
] services is morphing into the more useful--and
] profitable--goals of providing alternate interfaces to
] data and services. Social networking services are groping
] for more dimensions of value. Wireless meshes made of
] small devices continue to accelerate decentralization.
] Mobile devices of many forms and functions now inhabit
] desktops, pockets, and cars. Hackers have discovered the
] joys of cracking open devices to prod and mod, using
] cheap, off-the-shelf technology.

Conference Schedule for E-Tech 2005. I am really loooking forward to several talks, and reconnecting with people that I met at FOO Camp. I will be presenting during the Maker's Faire Wednesday Night.

However I am more and more confused about this conference the more I think about it. I've talked with Decius and we both agree: This conference seems to have an identity crisis. Who is their target audience? I'm not sure I know. With an extremely heavy price tag ($1250 for early-bird special), it is out of reach to all except people sent by their companies. My feel is the conference is aimed at getting corporate support/adoption of new waves in technology. Certainly putting together a showcase of possible "the next thing"s and presenting them is one way. But you alienate all your small/Hobbyist OSS programmers/researchers who *are* developing the next thing. If you are running a conference on "Emerging technology," who do you want as your audience? Hackers or Suits (or hackers with a picture of a suit printed on a black T-shirt)?

Take Blogging for example. It is largely a grassroots effort. IBM didn't embrace social networking and help drive it into the mainstream. While corporate support can certainly drive technological adoption of practices or standards, it is not required. In fact the road to hell is paved with corporate pushed bullshit "technologies." So I guess the question isn't who is the conference aimed at, but rather what do the organizers hope to accomplish?

If the point is to make money, this will certainly do it. However, having met and talked with several O'Reilly folks, my impression is profit doesn't drive all their actions (which is probably why I like them so much and want to do more with them in the future). They are recognized leaders in the publishing/media space, and I doubt this conference provides a massive amount of revenue for them (At least in my understanding, which is limited).

So what is the point? Major adoption of a technology by a corporation isn't necessary, and in fact can have the opposit effect. In my experience (and I have never really worked for a large company), large companies (certainly the ones that will drop $1200+ to send an employee somewhere) don't jump on the bandwagon of a technology, especially a OSS technology they didn't develope, overnight. Linux was about 10 years old before IBM took note.

If anything, the "cool" and "next generation" technologies that get adopted are those that are useful. Period. If its useful, people will use it. First privately, to scratch an inch. CDE looks bad, I want it to look like my old C64! Perhaps a modifying lint/checkstyle to support you own programming style. Then it grows. Exchange doesn't do X, so someone hacks on Evolution. ASP sucks, so PHP is developed from a suite of publishing scripts to fully functional server-side scripting language. Soon enough OSS technologies are no longer the Bond-O filling in the dents on an existing technology, but on par with commerical solutions.

The conclusion I seem to be forming in my head is having a conference priced so high isn't a good idea if your theme is "emerging technologies." If the theme was "enterprise adoption and scaled deployment of existing OSS Technologies," the price tag would certainly make sense. Lets get the developers and designers of these programs together with the VPs and CxO's and talk about how to get these technologies to scale and be stable for mission critical business apps.

But the conference is "Emerging Technology" Now, if by "Emerging" they mean "cool stuff that's been around a while and businesses are just catching on shhhhh!" then yes, I can also see that. However, if by "Emerging" they truely mean "cool stuff that is still beta/an idea on the back of napkin that the developers need help with so come see what is going on and pool ideas," then price doesn't seem to attract that crowd. FOO Camp was very much a "cool beta/back of the napkin" gathering, and was *incredibly* fruitful.

I will hopeful learn a lot more about the reasoning behind E-Tech when I am there. Based on what I know now, I think the conference could be structured differently to attrach the widest range of developers, and thus as a whole more benefit the community and industry.

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005