I will definitely go. Despite being in Seattle, I’d recommend a smaller city like St. Louis, MO (where Strange Loop has been for the past 10+ years). It’s centrally located and is a lot cheaper than coastal cities.
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Some of the good things (IMHO) about Darmstadt as a venue was that it allowed people to freely walk around the city at night and it’s a fairly small place so it was easy to meet up with other conference participants.
Mexico City - not so much.
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yes, there is significant danger leaving your house…
will you becoming to nixcon america personally?
Personally i can’t wait… it’s gonna be awesome.
It depends on the neighborhood, in a city with 22M people, there are many safe parts of the city.
There are many conferences organized there, so there’s a track record.
Will be happy to help , live in USA , Houston / woodlands area
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Awesome news.
As unoriginal as it sounds I would love to see it happen in Silicon Valley/ San Francisco where I think would have the largest attendance and selfishly local to me 
If it does end up being in the Bay Area, I would be delighted to volunteer and help with all aspects of organizing.
If not in Bay Area let me know if I can help remotely or at least help spread the word.
Do you know any cheap conference places , and cheap and high quality accommodations?
My spider sense thinks san diego might be a better fit… .
it’s only a Amtrak ride away.
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We have a survey up at: !ERROR
Please respond and share in other mediums to get more community input.
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Not sure this will be as useful as expected for locations, since “Canada” is uh, quite a wide country; thinking about the “Where would you like [it]” question…
People in the eastern parts of North America may be fine with the more Eastward provinces, and similarly, in the western parts of North America, with the Western provinces. And in the same idea, even people in Canada may not be thrilled with the idea of a trip from (almost) one end to the other.
It’s quite the shed I’m building for painting, but countries vs. geography should have been two discrete question/answer sets, I think.
Similarly, the other questions require selecting a country and geography, meanwhile I believe many would be just fine selecting “North West”, “South East”, etc…
I believe that without extrapolating from the results, it may end-up skewing results in a way where I wouldn’t be confident in relying on them :/.
I’m also seeing it might lack proper representation of out-of-north-america intentions. The question for state/province/territory might allow others to answer in a useful manner, but it’s hard to say.
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On the distance question: 500 miles is practically nothing in North America. Plus, Americans often measure trips in units of time, not distance.
Options that might better capture willingness to travel:
- I would drive 0-2 hours.
- I would drive 3-5 hours.
- I would drive 6+ hours.
- I would fly 1-3 hours.
- I would fly 4+ hours.
As an example, flying from San Diego to Quebec City would be at least a nine-hour trip, not including driving or airport time at each end. It would be a 3000+ mile drive. Even Gibraltar to Moscow is a shorter trip. North America is big.
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I feel like there isn’t a good field in the survey to discriminate those who reside in Americas from those who do not, the closest being the free-form “Other” in “Which state/province/territory are you located in?”. I’d like to participate in the survey, but I wouldn’t want my answers to bias the statistics, and I imagine there might be more people from other parts of the world interested too?
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I’d be interested in volunteering as well, no matter where it’s held.
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I just loved that line on “no matter where it’s held” #nixfamily <3
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BLUF:
survey results are in and we need to establish a team to organize the conference
Survey
The survey at !ERROR has been active for more than two weeks. It seems prudent to look at two portions of the survey results, the Beginner and the Contributor. I can provide the raw results if anyone is interested, or chop up the data in different ways. In the charts below I removed the “no answer” to highlight the relative values.
Beginner
The reasons for attendance is a evenly split for this group:
This group prefers the US West Coast, Midwest, East Coast, Canada with highest responses for the West Coast. Mexico, Central America and South America all had large “could not” responses. When ranking, US locations were marked as most likely with East/West evenly split.
This group prefers a local location a bit more than “Contributors”:
Contributor
High incidence of “job”. Not much interested in basics.
US West Coast, Midwest, South, East Coast, and Canada are the contenders with this group, with East Coast being the most positive with lowest negative responses. Mexico, South America, and Central America all had large “could not/do not prefer” responses. When it came to asking to rank the most likely attendance.
Most people are willing to travel, with a preference for weekends:
Thoughts
Taking the responses as a whole, there are two identifiable groups to consider, beginner and contributor. The interest in the basics suggests having a workshop day specifically focused on providing beginners a way to get started and having advanced talks and hacking afterwards; which can also serve to inspire and provide subsequent context.
For the location; contributors are more willing to travel and prefer the East Coast while beginners are split between East/West but are slightly less willing to travel.
A suggested idea is to leverage SCaLE due to their prominence, existing logistics, and experience with co-located events (DevOpsDay,Kubernetes,MySQL,Postgres). @rossturk reached out and they are willing to help bring NixCon to the continent.
Next steps
create a team
@raitobezarius recently had a post (Governance through "project leads" in NixCon 2024) suggesting a bootstrap team to coordinate with. I want to leverage the large number of people who mentioned interest in volunteering in the survey itself. Please respond or let me know if you are interested in organizing NixCon! I’m looking to have an initial meeting sometime next week. This will be to set initial expectations and make any initial decisions. The timeframe is short because we would have to quickly make a decision on the SCaLE proposal (mid-March 2024) if we want a reasonable time for call-for-papers and individual travel planning.
decide on venue + timeline
- Initial proposal is to review and decide on SCalE co-location (by end of Oct)
- Establish NixCon NA team (mid-Oct)
- Decide on goals (end of Oct)
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Can you break out the regions people were most willing to travel to? Specifically “prefer to travel here” and “would travel here” grouped together to get a sense of where people are “neutral or higher” on traveling.
What are the numbers on the y-axis? Percent of responses?
Sharing here as well for visibility: We are doing a short sync next week to explore the survey and kickstart some items. This will be shared asynchronously as well.
If you are interested to join please vote on the dates/time here → NixCon NA KickStart - When2meet
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I hope I’m not too late to volunteer. Please let me know how I can be of assistance!
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No such thing, are you on Matrix chat by any chance?
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