Why attend the Jasig Spring 2010 Conference

With the economy in shambles (but hey, it's recovering!), it's becoming increasingly tougher to obtain travel money to attend all the conferences you'd like to attend. You need to become more selective and only choose a few. I might be biased, but I think the Jasig Spring 2010 conference should be one of your top choices!

While Jasig is geared towards higher education, its products are used worldwide in universities, governments, non-profits, corporations (including major gaming companies and financial companies) and more. This means at the Jasig conference you can gain multiple perspectives on technology, which leads us to the first major reason to attend the Jasig conference.

Excellent Networking Opportunities

Jasig conferences are attended by people all over the world representing major institutions and organizations. This is an excellent opportunity to find out what others are doing, obtain tips, troubleshoot problems, bounce ideas around, and make friends so that when you go back home you've extended the number of people you can collaborate with (many Jasig-ers regularly collaborate with each other, whether officially or unofficially). The Jasig conference offers multiple opportunities for this networking including social events sponsored by the conference (the reception), events organized by the conference (dine-arounds), and time during the conference (breaks and birds-of-a-feather, as well as lunch!). In the past I've heard tons of advice being passed around including experiences with high availability, new frameworks, and sharing pains with deploying commercial software.

Affordable

The Jasig Conference is one of the more-affordable Java-focused conferences offering quality content. Other conferences can cost upwards of 2-3 times the amount that the Jasig conference does. One week training sessions that offer minimal value have similar price ranges to those "other" conferences. Save your money! Buy a Java 5 book, read it on the plane, and take some of the remaining money and learn from your peers at the Jasig Conference (presumably, your boss would be happy you saved a lot of money too, and offer you a promotion, but we can't guarantee that).

Content

There's content for everyone! (okay, maybe not for those Pascal developers, sorry!) Interested in learning more about Jasig projects? We've got presentations for newbies, advanced configuration and deployment, customizations, and roadmaps! Work on other stuff besides Jasig projects at your work? Don't we all! We've got that covered too. From presentations on management styles, tools, libraries, frameworks, identity management and even other languages (programming that is, you're not going to learn Spanish here), you'll find something you can take back and use at your work (and even impress your coworkers, unless they attended the conference too. And why not since its so cheap--see above)!

Pre-Conference Seminars

For those who really do feel they need to spend money on training (sometimes, it is better than the book), we've got affordable seminars on identity management, jQuery, Jasig Projects (CAS, uPortal, Bedework), portlets, and Groovy.

Keynotes

We've got awesome keynotes from top-notch people and organizations including Rod Johnson from SpringSource, Gregory Jackson from Educause, and Justin Erenkrantz from the Apache Software Foundation. The first and last are probably in charge of some of the most frequently used software at your organization.

The Environment

As I write this, it's about 31 degrees F in New Jersey and its 53 degrees F in San Diego, CA (though, obviously temperatures change). Either way, that's some nice weather! San Diego's also an awesome town with tons of stuff to do!

Who Should Attend?

Well, everyone! Duh! Oh, seriously? Well if you're in the state of California you really have no excuse (other than the fact that California's pretty big, and I think the state is bankrupt). Seriously though, if you're in California, it's a no-brainer to try and get out to this conference. It's affordable, in-state, and gives you a pretty good content-to-amount-paid ratio.

Jasig Deployers! If you're a Jasig deployer, you really can't turn this down! Meeting other Jasig deployers? Priceless! Finding out where Jasig is heading with their projects? Pretty darn useful.

Developers! Even if you don't actively work on a Jasig project at your job, you might some day! But besides that, there's plenty of content for the Java developer to learn and apply to the other applications that universities generally need to develop (plus you can then mentor all those people who couldn't attend). You also might find that another organization is doing something similar to what you're doing and collaborate (and hey, we have an incubation process just for those types of open source projects -- you can attend a presentation on that!). Also, its already been stated, but the networking opportunities in general are something you can't get elsewhere.

Managers! With all this talk of development, what's a manager to do. Plenty! You'd also probably find those Jasig project presentations quite handy. Higher level presentations on identity management architecture, agile, and partner projects (i.e. Kuali) would probably keep you pretty busy! If not, you and other managers can get together and swap management stories and deployment horror tales (and hopefully learn a thing or two).

All in all, there's something for everyone at this conference. If you're not convinced, I can do one of those top ten reasons you should come. Any takers? No. Ah, well. Then, take a look at our seminars, program, speakers and be sure to register for the Jasig Spring 2010 Conference. And be prepared for Powerpoint Karaoke! See you there!