So Many Stages
Published 19 years, 3 weeks pastQuite suddenly, workshops and seminars seem to be all the rage, don’t they? The Carson Workshops schedule keeps growing, and the shows selling out. They recently announced a Web applications summit in London that frankly sounds amazing. UIE recently announced a six-city roadshow, and seats are already selling. Clear:left is sponsoring a one-day show on Ajax programming starring the indominitable Jeremy Keith. And then of course there’s my personal favorite, An Event Apart, which sold out six weeks before the Philadelphia event (which is, yikes, now only a week away!) and is soon to visit other cities. Keep an eye on the AEA RSS feed to get the latest on those cities, by the way.
Look over all the workshops’ line-ups, and you see a lot of big names and smart people standing on stages (or at least in front of rooms) talking about some truly important and interesting topics. A determined workshop-goer could run him- or herself quite ragged trying to catch even half the shows, given their geographic dispersion and temporal proximity. It’s almost a shame, because every one of them sounds really, really interesting. Have I said the word “interesting” enough times yet?
But really, the most interesting part to me is not that these seminars are being announced, but that they’re generating such strong interest—that they’re selling out. It’s another indicator, and a very clear one, that the industry is well and truly recovering.
Addendum: just to add a little bit more support to what I said, 37signals announced their overhauled Basecamp seminar, The Getting Real Workshop, and sold all fifty seats in twelve hours. Whoa.
Comments (6)
Eric Meyer is a great inspiration to all learners of CSS
All those workshops and I can’t afford to go to any of them. Boo hoo! That’s the problem with working in the public sector (education). (If we want to go to anything over £200, including travel, we have to apply at the beginning of the financial year.)
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As Eric points out, the increase in the number of seminars, workshops and conferences, […]
I think it’s a sign that the economy is turning around. If there are lots of people unemployed, then it doesn’t make sense to spend money on workshops, because chances are you can hire someone easily who already has the skills.
Once the pool of potential quality employees dries up because everyone is well situated, then companies invest activities, such as training and workshops, to make the best from the employees they have.
It’s a good sign.
One thing that’s a shame about all these great workshops is the price. I understand the people giving them want to make some money, but most of them are priced too high for those of us that would have to pay out of pocket, either because of working for a company that would not pay, or working as an independent contractor (as I’m currently doing). The only one with a combination of enough people speaking and an affordable entry fee that made it worth spending the extra money on flights and hotels is SXSW.
I’m also amazed that Boston is never on any of the location lists. Boston, who’s Rt 128 corridor was once second only to Silicon Valley for tech companies, never gets any of the good speakers.
I’d love to see some of these workshops go for around $200 to be more affordable for us independents, but I don’t see that happening as long as they are selling out with prices close to $1,000.
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stages post
eric meyer writes all about stages
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