September 11th, 2008
OSCON outgrows Portland
OSCON is moving to the Valley.
After six years of bringing 2,000 people each summer to the Oregon Conference Center in Portland, O’Reilly is moving the show to the Bay Area for next year.
Travel costs are the stated reason. But The Oregonian harbors darker thoughts, noting that since the OSBC merged to form the Linux Foundation its operations have also moved south. Might Linus be next?
Seriously, I think there is something deeper at work here. Growth.
Portland just doesn’t have the facilities to house a fast-growing conference covering a global audience. On the other hand LinuxWorld does not yet fill the Moscone Center, and San Jose also has a very attractive convention center.
It’s the nature of industries. Valley girls and boys should note that growth also takes events out of the Valley as well, depositing them in the deserts of Las Vegas, or the lakeside of Chicago, even downtown Atlanta, where I live.
Since the demise of Comdex, in fact, the tech industry has had no “meeting of the clans” save for the January CES show in Vegas, and the fight to restrict it to the trade and keep it from growing much past 100,000 attendees is constant.
So how big should events like OSCON, and Linuxworld for that matter, be getting? What would be unmanageable? How big is too big?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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