We are canceling RedisConf 2013 due to lack of interest from attendees and sponsors.
We have contacted the handful of ticket holders and we will be doing our best to help them work out their preferences.
Ben Arent is still going to put together a great (but informal) Redis get-together on the same date in Portland, tentatively including a Redis hackathon in the morning and a meetup with talks in the afternoon where Salvatore Sanfilippo will be giving a full-length talk. These will be followed by an invitation to the RealtimeConf opening party.
(One good thing is most everyone interested in RedisConf is also interested in RealtimeConf. In fact, there are only a couple of people who bought a ticket to RedisConf without accompanying it with a ticket to RealtimeConf and we're offering them to convert their RedisConf ticket to a full RealtimeConf ticket, saving $300.)
Why cancel?
Let me first start by saying this is no one's fault but my own. We simply tried to take on too much at once and I went against my better judgement. I had decided twice not to hold RedisConf 2013.
RealtimeConf is the "parent conference" so to speak of RedisConf, and it's the most ambitious undertaking we've ever put together. There was no way we were ever going to come close to breaking even on this year's event.
RedisConf was going to be a great one-day conference accompanying it, but we needed it to break even or do considerably better than that—and we were counting too much on the popularity and interest people showed in it last year.
I originally made the decision to cancel RedisConf 2013 because I thought demand was not going to be very high and we were quite interested in coupling RealtimeConf with a new WebRTC event.
We believe RedisConf 2012 was primarily a success because of its timing with the release of Redis 2.6—we believed (and still believe) that its Lua scripting gives it unbelievable power and versatility and we were excited to gather people together from around the world to talk about it.
I changed my mind right before following through with that decision. I reached out to Ben Arent to see if he was interested in helping with curation for RedisConf and he was.
Ben has been terrific.
He's put in a lot of energy and time and he's been great to work with. I simply haven't had the time to provide him with the support he's needed in order to make the event work. RedisConf 2013 not happening isn't Ben's failure, it's mine.
Redis is a great tool. It has a wonderful community of users. It very well may justify an annual conference—it just will not be run by our team.
RealtimeConf+++
There is definitely some good that is going to come out of this hard decision. Our team organizing RealtimeConf can focus even more on making that everything we want it to be and we'll have considerably more energy to do it.
I can assure you, RealtimeConf is a can't-miss event if you care about the Open Web, are interested in the convergence of web technologies like WebRTC, WebSockets, XMPP, and more, and understand that now is the time to gather the people together who want to preserve our privacy and ensure open communication.
We're aiming to bring together the most passionate and idealistic developers to share, dream, discuss, and hash out the future of a web that can overcome the dark spectre of corporate silos and government invasion that threaten to undermine what the powerfully positive democratic force the web can have.
I'm sorry.
If you were planning on being part of RedisConf, I am so sorry for letting you down.
I feel this is the right decision, but it is most definitely painful to admit we've failed you.
Thank you for understanding.
–Adam
PS I intend to write a personal follow-up post-mortem on this at some point. There are some important things I feel I've learned through it that I feel could be useful to share when I have a chance.