This issue of the newsletter is all about Goatmire Elixir. The Elixir event me, my wife and about 180 of our closest friends are making happen in Varberg Sweden. This September. 10th to 12th.

Tickets are on sale and more than half are already gone. If you are already attending and informed. Read on, I'll try and share my experience crafting a conference so far.

And if you haven't heard, it also includes the first ever NervesConf EU. Check out goatmire.com.

Speakers

The process so far

If you are entirely missing the event. Sorry to hear it. We will release videos of all the sessions.

We have hotel deals. We have speaker accomodations. We have a venue. We have speakers to put in accomodations. We have images for socials. We have a website. We have ticket sales. We have done a CFS. We have a program committee. We have sponsors. We have grants. We have Lenin in a sauna. We have good prices on prison cells. We have a budget, that is mostly good. We have .. food .. kind of (scratching furiously at todo list). We .. will have .. coffee. We have some extra hospitality plans for speakers.

The practicalities are the exhausting thing to me. So. Many. Details. The part that I think some people would find the difficult part is of course what I find the fun, exciting and fairly straightforward part. Finding speakers. Crafting the idea. Even finding sponsors. Sponsors is less easy because it is fundamentally a sales process but it hasn't been the struggle it can be. The community is really friendly and wants new small conferences to succeed. Also immense credit to the local bank here and the foundation that owns it which is stepping in with a big grant.

This is a cool thing about doing something locally. The town itself, both public and privately owned parts, is showing excitement about this happening and helping make it real. A 150 person conference is not a big deal in Lisbon or Krakow. It is in Varberg. Anyone who is attending is bringing know-how, skills, attitude and energy into a town that is small enough that it will be noticed. Heck, I need to make a decision on whether I want someone from the City Council to drop by and speak. I'm not sure they'll get the vibe :D

Getting a Program Committee together was a great move and which was pushed for by my colleague Tomie. I'm thrilled by the crew I pulled together. Sophie Debenedetto, Rebecca Le and Cornelia Kelinske. Some speakers were already invited and picked when they joined but considering we have aroudnd 30 speakers and I turned down more than 40 submitted sessions I am glad I had their input. It also gives me some cover when I'm saying no to people I know personally that I encouraged to submit. oof

The way we get things done for this conference is, admin, accounting and various practical bits are done by Stina, my wife and partner in Underjord. We have Helene Mattisson contracted to help make sure we know what we are doing and are on the path to success as she has made events before, we have not. I do marketing, design, content, sponsorships, relationship-wrangling with various entities. I get help in all these of course but typically execution lands on me. I may end up with a toolchain that I can open-source for how I tie together Sessionize, Tito and Inkscape to get stuff done with just these two hands.

Responses to the conference have really made a difference. At ElixirConf EU I heard so many people say they would be coming and that they were really excited. So attendees are hype. And I know speakers are hype because I'm getting some fairly involved questions and requests that I look forward to discussing with the theatre. It means the world to me that speakers are taking the idea of a slightly wilder conference to take bigger swings. If you look at the talks I listed out at the top of the speaker list, they are all poetic titles. I did not do that. I've just said "no changelog talks, make something you find interesting". These are fundamentally creative people that love connecting with their community and trying to transmit the ideas that are in them out further.

Having the first NervesConf EU is also personally very meaningful and it is shaping up to be one of the larger NervesConfs ever.  Roughly 75% of tickets sold so far has included the NervesConf ticket which should mean 100+ people for that.

There may end up being a bonus event the day after. Plans are to early to say for certain. But you know what? If you want to plan hack sessions, meetup style things or have something social happen before or after the conference. Reach out, happy to help with venue and broadcast.

Love the excitement and I hope I can document our experiences pulling this together so that others can do similar things.

You can reach me here on email, on the fediverse where I'm @lawik@hachyderm.io, on Bluesky or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.