Considered but constrained

I decided to pull together an event. Of course I want the most carefully designed event possible. I've read The Art of Gathering. I know what boring is. I know that if you sweat every last detail you can get something truly brilliant.

The reality is, some of the best events I've been to have not been that particular. They've gotten the right people in the door, they've offered food, a framework of a schedule and largely gotten out of the way. Provided the invisible support, the encouragement and the effort.

Goatmire Elixir and NervesConf EU will be idiosyncratic in comparison to larger conferences. It definitely has a lively identity as a concept. The venue is kind of unusual and very pretty. The city is small but very nice in key ways. I feel like I'm constantly underdesigning and underworking the creation of the event. Which is how I feel about every creative thing I've ever done. I feel insufficient, but in the best cases I persist.

There are things people have asked about like whether we will share recordings of the talks that I take as an absolute given. Whether speakers will have accomodations taken care of. I wish we had the budgets to cover travel. Unfortunately no, I wanted the event to be affordable and that's a lot of money typically. We cover some to ensure their talks can happen. Case-by-case, which I don't love but it make sense. We try to do the good thing wherever we can.

And one reason to do the event for me is to put down local roots, terraform my local community to be more breathable to me. Get some Elixir into the atmosphere and show the local students I connect with that you can work globally, you can be involved in open source, the world open to you is massive and much more interesting than what is immediately visible. I invite my global community into my local community. I tingle with the potential of it all.

The cool part is that everyone else that is needed to pull this together has picked up the idea, the vibe, the creative space and they are running with it. Speakers offering flavorful talks, applauding the single-track approach, leaning into the metal tinge. The idea is mine, plenty of people work with me in putting together the event and to make it real but if you asked them about the details I'm sure they would have chosen differently. Thankfully we can all agree on pink and cyan. I can take a lot of the creative credit and deserve the blame for any false notes we play. But then people paint in and around those lines with talks, sponsorship concepts and more. Speakers have been very clear that they are genuinely excited about the event. That's all I need. It does not need to be perfectly designed. It needs to be exciting to people.

This year for me is absolutely packed with decisions, design choices, practicalities. Making a next event seems like it will be a lot more delegatable. This year we don't know what we need and I'm the multi-tool for much of this. I talk to most of the venue, catering, hotels. I create the website, I select the CFP service (Sessionize) and set that up, I select the ticketing service (Tito) and set that up. I conceptualize (with a fair bit of help) the not-for-profit, gather some founding member companies and then my wife, love her for this, put together the admin.

I am not trying to brag. It is a bug that I'm such a linchpin in this. I've not been able to delegate more because the event is my madness and I don't know enough of what I want and need up front to be able to explain it. So I'm doing it. And being a massive bottleneck in the process of course. Also we can't pay anyone reasonable amounts of time to work on it currently. Thankfully we've had a good amount of time to prepare. It also comes down to who we are and who can do what. Next year I can point at what we've done in the past and work with other people to help make that happen. This year everything starts from zero.

I have personally seeded the conference with enough speakers. I have collected a bespoke set of sponsors. I've made connections to, applied for and received critical grants. I can't delegate my network. It is a thing I've done which doesn't transfer. I don't have a magical address book, partially just because the connections are all over Discord, Slack, Bluesky, e-mail and whatnot.

This is quite hard to balance with running a consultancy. And we won't be extracting money from this event. I'm definitely eating a lot of opportunity cost in billable hours. But I'm also leveling up. Definitely not bored.

Design-wise I feel like we are making a lot of fairly normal choices which feels dull at times. But fundamentally I don't want my first event to be the one where we go "what would happen if we make 150 people skip lunch". Having food is more important than my hipster desire for the best food or the quirkiest event. Terrible truth.

We have checked with experienced event people and they seem to indicate that we are mostly on top of things. Still lots to do. Things look good though and I'm very excited!

So events this year, currently:

• Code BEAM America, next week (speaking, last minute)
• ElixirConf EU, May (during my birthday, not speaking currently)
• Code BEAM Stockholm Lite, June (speakers not announced yet)
• Goatmire Elixir & NervesConf, September (speaking, probably)

Goatmire roughly follows what I've seen from GigCity Elixir for scale and some tools from Code BEAM et.al. I'd love to explore something more akin to Fosdem as well. Waaay more open, waaay weirder :)

I'd love to hear your thoughts on good events and if you have any reflections on what we're doing. Let me know on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.

The Elixir shirt pre-orders will ship sooooooon oswag.org.