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Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2014 18:04:26 +0000
From: Isabel Drost-Fromm <isabel@apache.org>
To: jan i <jani@apache.org>
Cc: "dev@community.apache.org" <dev@community.apache.org>
Subject: Re: On geeks growing up - wrt. ApacheCon
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On Mon, Mar 03, 2014 at 02:32:10PM +0100, jan i wrote:
> Apachecon will be in europe later this year, so the european perspective is
> equally important.

Great.


> I think the idea is good.

Thanks - it's just that in recent years I've observed more and more conferences become family friendly.


> The entrance fee to AC is pretty high, but maybe
> we could combine your idea with the idea of having a day (or half) where we
> in general open up, and give spouses, our kids etc a chance to see why we
> like spending soo much time with apache...meet some real people.

Keep in mind though that the entrance fee is not the only hurdle. I've tried a few approaches to motivating spouses and kids to attend (offer city tours like FOSDEM does, try to find out whether people would be interested in a play area in advance) - in general people are hesitant to bring their family unless offerings are very clearly communicated (not everyone at Apache is as lucky as myself being married to a hacker who likes Linux kernel development goes a long way to visiting events like Froscon, FOSDEM, LinuxTage etc. together).

One option to advertise non-tech offerings actually can be the ticket form itself: Tickets for kids and non-tech people should cover food and drinks, but should be way lower in prices than general conf admission (on-site this is relatively easy to "enforce" by differently coloured wrist bands). Again there needs to be some incentive/something to do for the family joining - having the conference take place in an interesting location and offering the ticket as hallway/catering ticket is one trivial option...


Isabel