Lindsey Kuper

The short version of this post: The last-ever !!Con is coming up in a month from today! Please spread the word about !!Con and get your tickets here!

If you’re not familiar with !!Con, it’s a radically eclectic, radically inclusive, radically affordable (pay-what-you-want!) independent nonprofit computing conference. I co-founded !!Con with a group of friends back in 2014, and there’ve been a bunch of iterations of it since then.

!!Con consists almost entirely of ten-minute lightning talks about “the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing”.  Any computing-related topic is fair game – as long as the title of the talk contains at least one exclamation point! Sumana Harihareswara’s “Toward a !!Con Aesthetic” beautifully captures a lot of what I think makes !!Con special.

This year is extra-special – it will be the last !!Con, and we’re doing something different: for COVID safety reasons (and just because we want to), we are holding the conference completely outdoors! It’ll be held in the courtyard of the Baskin School of Engineering, on the campus of UC Santa Cruz (where I work), in sunny and scenic Santa Cruz, California, USA. (UC Santa Cruz was also the site of the two previous west-coast editions of !!Con, !!Con West 2019 and !!Con West 2020, the latter of which was the last in-person !!Con before the pandemic became a pandemic – but those were indoor events.)

You might think of Santa Cruz as a touristy beach town, and you wouldn’t be wrong – but it’s also a secluded oasis of coastal California redwoods, about an hour’s drive from the bustle of Silicon Valley. It’s a wonderful place to spend a weekend!

Now, here’s why I’m asking for your help. Earlier this year, the !!Con 2024 organizing team decided to quit Twitter, where we had 5k+ followers, in favor of federated social media not owned by Elon Musk. We are now on Mastodon, where we have a small fraction of the following we once had.

We began selling tickets five days ago. In the past, !!Con tickets have often sold out in a matter of hours, or even minutes – truly, they’ve gone scarily fast at times. But this year, while our first 50 tickets went very quickly, presumably to our most hardcore fans, we’ve seen a slump after that. As of this moment, we’ve sold 99 tickets, when we were hoping to sell about twice that many.1

While it’s possible that people just don’t care about !!Con this year, I suspect that a big part of the problem is that we’re failing to reach our usual audience, perhaps as a result of having left Twitter. A friend mentioned that, despite being on our mailing list, he didn’t realize that tickets were on sale until he happened to look at our website a couple of days ago. (We really don’t want to abuse our email list – we tell people when they sign up that we’ll only send them four or five emails a year – but the result is that our handful of emails get lost in a blizzard of marketing emails. My friend told me that in the few days since we sent our announcement about ticket sales opening up, he’s received eleven marketing emails from Petco.)

My worry about slow ticket sales is exacerbated by the fact that, due (I guess) to the ongoing tech downturn, we weren’t able to line up any corporate sponsors this year. (Know anyone who still wants to sponsor us? Send ‘em here!) That’s also the reason why this year, our tickets have a suggested price of $256, which is higher than it’s been in the past. Although $256 is only a suggested price, we do have to sell a certain number of tickets at a certain price to break even. And break even is all we’re trying to do – we’re a nonprofit organization, and this is the last !!Con, so we intend to leave the bank account more or less empty. But we still need to be able to pay our bills, which are high this year due to our outdoor venue. We’re having to rent a bunch of stuff: a portable stage, chairs, tents, and a pricey outdoor “video wall” because projection doesn’t work very well in bright daylight outside.

So: we really need your help spreading the word about !!Con so we can sell our tickets, pay our bills, and have a successful last event! If you’re reading this and you want to help, here’s what you can do:

  • Most importantly, please spread the word about !!Con to anyone you know who might want to go!
  • If you live in the area or it’s not too far for you to to travel, you should join us in person for !!Con if you can! Get your tickets here!
  • If coming in person is not an option, we have an online-only ticket for a suggested donation of $8! This’ll get you access to our 2024 Discord; Discord was a popular feature of the online-only !!Cons in 2022, 2021, and 2020, so we’re keeping it this year.

Thank you for helping us out!

  1. Initially, we opened up sales for only 100 tickets (two batches of 50 each), intending to open more batches once the fire marshal approved us to have more people in our outdoor space. (It turns out that even for an outdoor event, fire marshals have to give the go-ahead.) Well, two days ago we did get the fire marshal’s approval (hooray!), but with the first 100 tickets selling more slowly than we’d anticipated, I hope there’s actually a reason to need said approval. ↩

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