NixCon North America exploratory survey

We have a survey up to help us guide the planning for a proposed NixCon in North America, mainly about the location. Please help us by answering: !ERROR

( we’re asking the same underlying question in several different ways - couldn’t decide on a single way to ask it )

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cross-posting here to have a focused location for the results

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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Hey Tom! I’m interested in helping organize this.

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Hi Tom and Ross, I’d like to help organize for NA too!

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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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