The conference is in downtown San Francisco, provides 6 meals, and is throwing 2 parties.
If you think $500 is expensive than I don't think you have any idea how much it costs to rent a 300-person conference room at even a mediocre hotel (let alone catering on top of that). And this isn't a mediocre hotel, it's the Hyatt Regency.
That doesn't even touch on the cost of organizing and running the conference, travel and hotel for speakers, etc, etc, etc.
Shmoocon did 1600 people (1200 attendees + speakers/staff). Tickets were $150/ea. The Hotel was the Washington DC Hilton, right in Dupont Circle and freshly remodeled. The hotel was $40k, the open bar on Sat. night was $30k. They brought in $300k and had $100k left over.
It's seriously not that expensive, although 6 meals might cost quite a bit more...but only for 300 people? I can't imagine it costing THAT much more.
I recently got a "exhibitor kit" packet that lists the costs of renting certain items for your conference display. You know, tables, monitors, booth structures, rugs, plants, extension cords. Stuff marketing teams don't want to deal with packing in and out.
$65 to have power available in your area. $100 for a table. $200-500 for area rugs. $80 dollars an hour for labor to help setup or tear down. A 22" monitor is $200 - you could buy it and throw it away for that price.
I'm not saying it's highway robbery, but it's shocking, and probably indicates running a conference that pops up and then tears down efficiently is simply more expensive than you would initially guess.
The rates are outrageous partly because all the work (from moving crates to Internet) is done by union workers. The convention centers have exclusive contracts with companies like GES, also driving up costs.
I've never really understood it either. RailsConf is $700. I don't know what the turn-out is but I would guess ~1,000 people maybe? That is $700,000. Maybe I am just unaware how much a conference costs to put on, but that seems like a ton of money. Plus most conferences have sponsors too.
"Prices aren't based on cost, they're based on value."
Sometimes. MountainWest RubyConf is $125. There are other regional Ruby confs that are free. These are among the best and most valuable gatherings I've attended. The organisers are aware of this value, but they're not doing it to make money so they're not jacking up the prices as they could.
When you look at the price for this or that conference, think about who's doing it, for what reason, and for whose benefit. Try to support those closest to your ideals.
Over the last couple of years, I have come to believe(firmly) that most(if not all) paid conferences are more about money and coolness(Hey! you know we are cool because we throw huge conferences).
They want us to pay more because they want to get star speakers, treat them to 5-Star hospitality and make you listen to them and believe whatever they are saying is correct. It's more about business building and less about learning. Now I am not against business development and if there is a chance that one can get good business, spending 2% of the amount of expected business is not a bad deal at all. But label it that way "Damn It" and I will shut up.
On the other hand, I have found that meetups of smaller user groups much more helpful and better from the learning point of view.
Most conferences have different pricing tiers to deal with this stuff. Seeing as how this is Github's first conference, if enough people bug them they might do something about this.
I'm not self employed, I work for gdgt. I just wish I didn't have to bug my employer to fund me attending this kind of stuff and would much rather pay for it out of my own pocket because (personally) I tend to care more about something if I'm paying for it out of my own pocket.
Argh, really sorry about that, had the wrong url on my clipboard when I submitted — and unfortunately there's no editing urls :/ I guess maybe I should learn to read what I'm typing.
Conferences are valued by their ability to capture the energy of a focused audience. OSCON lost most of its value as open source 'won': the featured technologies were too diverse and the rallying cry of 'open source!' was mostly met with "duh! of course".
I'm curious to understand the focus of this one: folks who love github? Cutting edge technology, as blessed by github?
For a minute, I thought CodeCon was coming back. Darn! That was a cool conference. I somehow managed to scam my way into speaking at the first one -- I was the least smart person there by far!
