Announcing Group By: A New Kind of Free Community Conference

Let’s try something new. Let’s build a free event by the community, for the community, where:

Speakers submit abstracts publicly online. Anybody can submit an abstract on any topic – community members, software vendors, even Microsoft’s Bob Ward has submitted a session on 2016: It Just Runs Faster.

Attendees suggest tweaks to the abstracts. You leave comments on the abstracts, and you rate the topic, the abstract, and your likelihood of attending. Your constructive criticism helps refine their abstracts. For example, Alex Yate’s session on DevOps 101 has had a lively discussion in the comments, and he’s using that feedback to help craft a better abstract. If you’re a presenter, you should put in an abstract just to get the detailed, insightful feedback people like Hugo Kornelis and Adam Machanic have been giving.

The 5-7 top-voted sessions are picked. You, dear reader, are building this conference for yourself. Voting closes on December 16th, and the ones you’re most likely to attend – those are the ones that will be picked.

On Friday, January 13th, the whole thing happens live. Register to watch, and we’ll do it live, with me as your cohost throughout the event. I’ll take your typed-in questions and ask ’em out loud, help with technical glitches, and manage the recording process. If you miss the event, no worries – the sessions will be posted to YouTube, a podcast feed, and the site.

Everything gets done transparently in public: the abstracts, the presenters, the comments, the voting, and the conference itself.

It’s called Group By. Go check it out, and rate the sessions you’d like to see!