Disclaimer

I am writing these articles because I have been asked to share my thoughts on YAPCs outside of YAPC::Asia. I don’t really mean to pick on other YAPCs (if I wanted to do that I would have done that a long time ago).

I have never been involved in a YAPC organizer group outside of YAPC::Asia Tokyo. So there are a lot of things that I’m assuming and guessing.

This article is based on things I have seen as an attendee of some YAPCs, and things that I have read or heard from others. If there are people who claim that my story is wrong, they are most likely correct.

TL;DR;

IMHO running a conference is about knowing what you want that conference to be. Having a vision/goal allows you to make better and more cohesive choices, which leads to a running better conference.

My Story

First YAPC I organized: YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2009

(c) Japan Perl Association

When I took over YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2009, I had a clear goal: I wanted the event to attract more people, and I wanted those people to be new people — people who have not necessarily been using Perl

In order to follow my goal of getting more people from non-Perl groups to participate, I ditched the idea of doing a “Perl-only event for Perl-enthusiasts” conference in the very early stages of being involved in the conference organization.

Sure, I wanted to promote Perl, but I thought that promoting Perl to the same people who had always been involved in the Perl community just did not seem like the best path to take. I thought — and I still believe this to be true — that running a strictly Perl-centric conference would be a dead end for Perl.

miyagawa gave the closing keynote at YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2010

(c) Japan Perl Association

Based on this vision of mine, we started making many changes:

We changed the Call For Papers abstract to read: “Talks need not be about Perl, but if we get two talks that look as interesting as the other, we will choose the one that talks about Perl. If your talk is not about Perl, we ask you that you include the word ‘perl’ in your talk a couple of times”

Partially as a result of the previous item, we started receiving, and accepting, more talks about solutions rather than “how to build X in perl,” which seems dominant in other YAPCs.

We started promoting YAPC to a much wider audience, by cooperating with tech magazine/websites such as 技術評論社 for articles, and placing promotional articles in places like CNET Japan, among others.

…and many many more.

You may not agree with each of the items, but they were conscious choices to achieve our goal. We had good reasons for it. And when we do feel that we made mistakes on those choices, we can change it based on proper quantitative reasoning (“Is this helping us achieve our goal?”) rather than on a whim.

But wait, why would I run a YAPC and not necessarily focus on Perl? Answer: my intention was to promote Perl, the culture, and Perl, the community to the people that otherwise would have had no interest in Perl, as opposed to promoting Perl, the language.

I think I was able to sum up this direction in my Closing speech at YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2012:

* YAPC::Asia should be the most welcoming geek event: for anybody that wants to talk about tech.

* YAPC::Asia should be about tech, and the love for tech.

* YAPC::Asia should be a place to share a glimpse of this marvelous community

So YAPC::Asia Tokyo started shifting towards “an event for geeks of any area of expertise to share their knowledge, but with a bias towards Perl” starting from YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2009.

I think the shift became obvious around YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011, and the shift has been completed as of YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2014 (“completed” as in, the rest of the world now recognizes YAPC::Asia to be “a fun place for all techies”, not “a place where all the Perl geeks go”)