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by Alan Knowles.
Original Post: Conferences, the odd call for submissions
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Every year PHP has two or three major conferences, as someone who knows a little bit about PHP, I often put in a proposal on the call for submissions. However, after presenting at a few, the whole process does seem a little odd.
PHP conferences are primarily commercial ventures, where the organizers costs (location, airfares, advertising etc.) are recouped by the attendance fees. However, the idea behind call for submissions, is something I would more often associate with academic type conference. The organizers tend to rely on the (usually very good) judgement of the reviewers of these submissions to decide what might prove interesting and attractive..
The conferences also have a secondary purpose of getting the PHP developers together, and frequently try and sort out some of the more interesting direction issues that some of the PHP projects are taking. (but this is almost never the primary goal of the conference for obvious financial reasons..)
What I end up wondering is what would the attendees actually like to hear about... What would make the costs associated with going to these conferences make them better value for money?
Interesting technical things like GTK, language internals etc. or more how to use a specific library, extension, a forum on where PHP is going... Or what was very succesfull at the PHP cruise a few years ago, a more interactive discussion about how to develop in PHP..
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