You can't have a long enough ribbon - or "this one's for Richard Fichtner"

Since I'm at home with time on my hands I've been doing some tiding up. Well "just moving stuff around" as my wife would probably say. During this exercise I discovered the conference badge for the last conference I went to. That's this one below for KCDC in Kansas City. As an aside - awesome conference: fabulous speaker support, great audience and , hey, I love the city too. It was a blast and I come home sad to leave and weary as heck.

Conferences should be hard work

Whether as a speaker or attendee (not to mention organiser, exhibitor, volunteer ...). if you don't leave a conference exhausted then you're not doing 'it' properly. A complaint often levied at professional speakers (aka DevRel) is that we're getting to travel the world on the company dime without any result.

There's two answers to that : yes and no. For sure if you're a regular fly-in / fly-out sort of speaker, where you're at the conference for about the time it takes to present ... Then I'd say 90% of the time you're not returning value to whoever's funding you. Even if you are there for the full conference it's still possible you're not returning the value you could.

DevRel is currently taking yet another beating because of perception that we're only in this job for the air miles. I plan to address this subject in more detail in another post but for now let's just say if you're being paid to speak at a conference you should at the very least:

• Network with the other speakers - that can help with discovering other conferences, getting accepted more easily, getting invites to user groups etc and even occasionally finding a speaker partner for some cool talk you've both just invented!
• Visit all the exhibitors - not to take swag (though often you see cool ideas to take home) but to find out what they think of the conference, how it works for them, why they are here. This is all important intelligence to take back when thinking about sponsoring the conference. It's also a great way to network, find new opportunities for talks, demos, articles etc.
• Speak to the attendees : attend the lunches, and the breaks, evening events etc. (as many as you can) and talk to people. Find out what makes the tick, why they are here, what they want to learn or meet. Ask them about technologies, companies, what they think of your offerings.. You have short access to invaluable feedback. Don't miss it.
• Attend some talks: Learn something new, see a speaker in action, see how the attendees react to the talks. You need to learn new 'stuff' all the time, It's hard being a watcher rather than talker but you're here to assess if the topic is useful to you and your role, and how well received it is. More essential feedback about the conference and what your target audience cares about.

Conferences should be fun

If you come back from a conference and it wasn't fun then you're in the wrong job or the conference was not very good. Either way time to change something.

I enjoy speaking at conferences but it's a partially a means to an end. I get to communicate something I believe developers need to hear but the real value is in the discussions afterwards. The feedback (good or bad) is important but the real win for me is when I know I've helped someone be successful. If I've steered them on a better path, shown how to do something in a different way, scared them into changing their (security) behaviour. I'll leave the conference buzzed.

If the conference itself is caring, the attendees are happy to be there, the talks are packed, then the event is going to be great and (generally) fun.

From a speaker POV we're part of the show, so it's important that our experience is good too. Some conferences go the extra mile, some go an extra 10 miles (hey KCDC - looking at you) in supporting their speakers.

That leads me , finally to the real point of this post..

Ribbons are an essential element of conferences

The KCDC badge has a couple of ribbons attached. It is important to note that you cannot have enough ribbons. Richard Fichtner and others did a fine job with JCON Europe recently. I got this:

A good effort but more needed for next time. In fact all conferences need to up their game here.

Here's my longest JavaOne ribbon (I had to split it to get it into the picture) - the bar has been set Richard Fichtner !

Wrap up

I did find quite a few conference badges when moving things around. I don't keep them all but it appears I kept more than I realised. Apart from a dozen JavaOne badges I found 130 odd other ones..

Amongst all this evidence of a life spent in pursuit of air miles what can I say. Looking at this sample all can say is

"Not enough ribbons"

Thanks for reading.