Re: PGDay 2008

On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 15:34 +0200, Hans-Jürgen Schönig wrote:

> absolutely, this is really important. the germany speaking area
> certainly has this problem.
> we should definitely make it 90% english - otherwise it is not useful at
> all. we want to talk to all people not just to some.
> in general, as an austrian it is good to speak english anyway to make
> sure that the germans can understand me at all :).
>
> i share your concerns - we will do it in english whenever it is possible
> to attract as many people as possible.
> prato was a really good conference. we should take this as a shining
> example.

Hans, I like Vienna, so its a good place for me.

I have a couple of thoughts:

To my observation PGday was a great success, thanks again to everybody
involved. You've set a high standard for anybody to match.

My thinking is that PGday was actually 2 events back-to-back. The first
event was a multi-language, international event, the second was an
Italian language event. We need both:

- We need to have advocacy meetings in each language zone/country. The
50% Italian attendees at PGday show that its possible to get a
reasonable gathering; we *need* that to happen in every country, not
just one. I would suggest these are called Regional User Group Meetings.
For my mind this is not the place to do heavy discussion on new
technical developments. Solutions, overviews, use cases, whats new.
Helpful to newbies and tech managers.

- An annual international event where we all get together and deeply
interested people can attend. Meeting up with everybody on this list is
a great idea. I think we should do that once per year, somewhere. It's a
very social event, which is important. I would suggest we call these
European Postgres Conferences. This is the place where we would have a
Code Sprint and discuss hacker stuff. We should have an international
organising committee, so that whichever country gets picked doesn't need
to do everything.

If we do PGday in the same format as before, then it benefits only the
host country and we'll end up fighting over the next location, just like
the Olympics. That will drive us apart, not together.

It might be a concern that we don't get speakers. If my flights &
accommodation are paid, I'll be happy to speak at any European meeting.
Maybe not something massively original each time, but the support is
there if you need/want it

--
Simon Riggs
2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com