🎉!

Happy Holidays and wonderful cheer to each and every one of you! It's Letter #1, and there's a lot that's been going on!

A New Conference

As was announced on Twitter, there's a new conference in town:

the CoSy Tech Con!

It stands for the (Co)mputing (Sy)stems (Tech)nology (Con)ference, but honestly that's an enormous mouthful. So just CoSy (pronounced like cozy) is good!

Why CoSy?

The motivation for the conference was two-fold. The first reason is quite simple: we needed a place where people beyond C++ developers could talk about the systems they work on and develop. We decided that we would make a conference that was going to embrace not just C++ developers, but C, Rust, Zig, FORTH, Nim, Fortran, Go and many, many more languages.

Part of being inclusive and creating a space where multiple people can come together is to do exactly that: a conference where languages become tools rather than the dominating feature of a given talk or -- indeed -- a conference!

The second reason is because it became very hard to keep justifying some of the abuse of the people providing significant sponsorship and donations to other C++ conferences. From the N-word to actually screenshotting folk's words out-of-context and sending it to their jobs to be fired, there's a lot the leadership of previous spaces have done to make tech hostile.

Asking the people in charge to change has not worked now, or the last 20+ times we've asked. So, well, it's time to vote with our wallets and our feet, and take the leap of faith for a better world! We've got a strong focus on accountability and transparency with how we're going to be running this conference and protecting the most vulnerable, which is why we're going to be sharing some of our monetary priorities below!

List of Priorities

There are a lot of folk who have offered their help, so to help keep both us and them focused, here is a preliminary list of the things we're focusing on funding to deliver the conference to you:

1. Platform Fees (just for hopin.to for interacting with others);
2. Live Transcription (English) of all talks for all days to help the hard of hearing;
3. Post-conference subtitling on all recorded and released videos (if Speaker consents to release);
4. Accumulating additional funds to pay every single speaker; and,
5. Finally, pay ourselves.

Because this is a free conference, we have about 10 months to cover the first three. The last 2 will be cherries on top for the free event. We plan to essentially spend every free dollar either improving the event by getting more skilled professionals to help us stitch the virtual event together, or paying out more and more to the speakers. We already have some ideas for generating revenue that we can put towards putting money in the Community's pocket, and we'll talk about these initiatives soon!

If you would like to get ahead of the curve on asking to be a speaker (for a Keynote or a regular talk), want to discuss early sponsorship, or have other things you'd like to let us know about, feel free to contact us here.

Keep an eye out for the Newsletter closer to the end of February. Submissions will be opening up a little after that, but folks like you will get the early access!

Thanks for supporting the dream. See you in the next 2 letters, next month!

— Shepherd's Oasis 💙

PSJ: Lately, one of us have been reading a book that has been impossible to put down. Which, as it turns out, makes a lot of sense, since it's about anti-gravity!