At the last developer user group, a discussion around .NET and the community came up where an issue was identified that because Microsoft does such a good job of communication around .NET, anything outside their realm is pretty much ignored. The example was that open source doesn’t get enough coverage at big events – my response, why doesn’t the community run their own .NET event. The idea would be that it targets a .NET audience, but the content is not limited to .NET i.e. you could present on Perl, but as the audience is .NET it would make sense to tailor the talk to the things those people expect and address there concerns. I ran a small poll to see what the response would be.
425 people ended up loading the poll, yet a mere 35 people completed it 
So looking at the data (hint, that link takes you to the live report). It seems that
- Free vs. cost: Isn’t an issue. I think the main thing here that if there is value people will pay.
- Weekday vs. Saturday: A weekday seems far more popular an option
- Multi-track seems a lot more popular than a single track.
- Johannesburg FTW! Cape Town and Durban are just a fraction of the amounts (the colours on the charts don't match up - so biggest is always blue, which doesn’t make sense).
So what is next? I am not sure – the numbers are surprisingly low which indicates to me that either we, as a community are horrid at sharing things, or there isn’t demand. Your thoughts?
Some analytical information
