I’ve been bandying around the idea of what I would like to attend in terms of a Se event, but figured I would see how out of touch I am with others through a quick survey.

As of this morning there were 45 responses to it, which is in itself pretty telling since I announced it on…

  • Twitter and between my followers who use Se and the RT’s it got hit an audience of I would guess ~ 150 – 200
  • the selenium-users mailing list which has 1736 members
  • the selenium-developers mailing list which has 308 members
  • IRC which usually sits between 30 – 50 these days

Overall an overwhelming lack of interest to the survey was shown. And yet, meetups like the San Francisco Selenium Meetup get ~ 100 people once a month so there appears to be a market for geeking out over Se.

The first question was about location, and to be honest, I have no idea how to interpret this other than What’s wrong with Toronto?.

Well, it is not really a shock that Silicon Valley got the most votes given the community legwork Sauce Labs has done already. The high Maybe response to Chicago is a positive though (as I like it a lot better than the valley). But Chicago in November is likely not the easiest sell. Maybe we should have it in Cozumel; Sun, Sand, Selenium!

The next question was on length. The format wasn’t an option (single track) just the length.

Useful, but I think 2 days content + 1 day tutorial is right answer as it is long enough to provide a mix of content and be able to justify travel. A one-day conference, that isn’t intended to just be a regional one, is just an extended meetup.

The third question confirmed a lot of what I thought it would, and means I’ll I have to convince a bunch of the Se2 kids to come speak.

The trick, as with any one-track one is to make the speakers diverse enough to not bore the entire audience all the time on topic they don’t understand or don’t care about.

The last non-free form question was the whole cost thing which was interesting, if not really useful information. Conference pricing is often done on a backwards basis in that you get all your fixed costs figured out, subtract your sponsorships (paid and/or expected) and then you arrive at a number. And then pray you don’t lose your shirt.

I suspect if I put down $75 as the lowest amount, it would have been the most. I’m guessing that the $200 roughly maps to the ‘1 day’ length of question 2, so doubling that to 2 days is $400 which is close to $500 and combined have the overwhelming total (all but one) then things are in agreement with what I had hoped for. SeConf would not be a huge production like Star and so wouldn’t need to charge as much. I would actually consider it a failure if we had to charge more than $500 for the conference. Tutorials, as is the common model, would be extra.

The final question was just a text box which resulted in lots of how come you didn’t pick my city? type responses.

I’ve still not wavered from the idea that there should be a dedicated Selenium Conference this year. Though we’re getting perilously close to being too late to have one this year given lead times on facilities and speaker travel planning. Especially if I am the driving force / organizer of it. I know exactly when and where the 2011 should be, but thats getting the cart in front of the horse somewhat. I may just have it in Toronto, survey results be damned; as someone pointed out yesterday, the trick is to have it happen this year. We can make it a huge success next year.