Freek Van der Herten: How PHP conferences can be improved

Freek Van der Herten has made a new post to his site sharing some of the things he thinks that could help to improve PHP conferences in general, not just ones in a particular area of the world.

The past year something has bothered me about the traditional formats most conferences in the PHP ecosystem seem to adhere to. I recently went to DotJS: a JavaScript conference which was organized very differently from the majority of PHP conferences I attended previously.

In this blog post, I'd to highlight what PHP conferences, in general, could consider copying from a conference like DotJS.

Among his suggestions are topics like:

• shortening the talk length
• making lightning talks a "first-class citizen"
• appointing a Master of Ceremony
• avoiding the Q&A portion of the sessions

There's a few other suggestions he offers to around audience seating and how many tracks to have. He spends some time on each point, explaining some of his thoughts and how it relates back to his experience at other conferences outside of the PHP community.