First of all, happy new Year! We hope this 2018 will be really good for all of you in every way ;-)
We want to share with you all few words about of our hopes and expectations for this year. As a developers we have a lot of ideas to grow, like be able to attract more women, organize events for younger people (to introduce them to the world of software development), run a hackaton (may be with another developer community?), organise events more focused in another technologies (may be learn new languages, why not?), contribute to opensource projects or try to help other people in need. To achieve all this, we need to grow, and from the organising team we are always open to welcome members who want to be active and go in this direction. So if you have time, we invite you to participate more actively in the community to propose or organise events or any other activity that you can do to contribute to all of us. Ping us in any case ;-)
Looking back on 2017, we work hard to organize more than 1 event per month (at least 14 events) and a really big one ( our lovely Java & JVM Barcelona Conference ). As you can imagine organizing events is always an unpaid effort under no circumstances, which requires us a significant amount of personal time (which we would like to have more of). Reviewing last year, we realised that the attendance rate was really low in many, if not most, cases (below 30%) and on reflection, we think this is not a good sign. Everyone has ups and downs (and we all have our own schedules), and we can always understand that there is a percentage of people who for various reasons cannot attend to our events. Last minute contingencies may also arise, but when not even half of the people registered for an event attend, it denotes a lack of seriousness, if not indifference, and we think it is not good. There are many people involved around an event, and also companies and people that are working for those companies, who spend time organizing a space, welcoming the attendees, setting up a room, buying some food and drink, etc. We think it is not fair for all of these people (organisers included) that their efforts are not rewarded, since at the end the number of people who attend is not by far the expected. It also happens that there are people who can remain on the waiting list and therefore are unable to attend to events for those who do not decide to cancel their attendance.
For these reasons we have decided to introduce some small changes in the way in which we are organising our events. This year in order to prevent the no-show effect for those people that register and never come that are creating problems to our sponsors and to us, we'll charge a small amount of money (about 2-3€) to everyone registering to one of our events. Finally, you do not have to worry about the money if you finally attend to one of our events, because we will give back that amount for those that really attend. We don't need or want the money, but we hope that in this way, the people who register will really come to the events we organize with a lot of care.
We hope you understand the reasons that push us to making this movement, but we cannot accept to continue disrespecting the organizers of the events as well as the companies that dedicate their time and effort to us.
Happy coding and see you soon! ;-)
