text stringlengths 0 1.36k |
|---|
**Alex Sexton:** It was like 1,200 people, or something like that. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** A handful. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** So I think over the past five years, and even especially with the rise of Node, there's a series of events that we have - I think four conferences. We tried to get some in Central America, but we're still trying to figure that out, and also in Mexico, which is North America. |
There's a great amount of Node School events, also there's NodeBots events... So there's a lot of JavaScript interest. Just in Colombia I believe we have ten regional meetups, which is pretty big. It's pretty cool to see it grow. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. We don't even have that in Texas. We have three, four... Something like that. \[laughter\] Anyways... You mentioned something that I'm gonna spider off from; you mentioned that it's hard to find content in Spanish... I've had these conversations a few times in a few different places, and one them... |
The same person could give the same course in English and in Spanish, and people will listen to the one that's in English because they assume that the content isn't as good in Spanish. Is that still true? |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** It is true. We have a pretty heavy cultural problem in Latin America which is we don't trust each other, because we tend to take a lot of advantage of each other, too. There's a lot of sketchy content or refurbished content, or just not high-quality content. If you search for web tutorials or p... |
The bleeding edge usually starts in English, and naming rights come from English. Then as you have people who are bilingual who have enough time to translate this content, then they'll do so. But you end up also having a lot of people who are bilingual who start with introductory content, so they start translating that... |
**Alex Sexton:** \[07:51\] I see. I guess why I brought that up is it feels like the conferences that you ran - JSConf Colombia, and I spoke at a few of those other ones, too - is the talks were half and half in Spanish and in English, depending on who gave the talk. Then there were translations there and Platzi I thin... |
Is this changing? Is this something that is getting better? Obviously, I understand that if someone writes a new React library in English and writes the docs in English, you have to be able to speak English in order to get that information on day one... So it makes sense, but it seems almost critical that we reach peop... |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Access is definitely improving. I think that definitely Platzi has had a huge impact. I think the first JavaScript course I gave was on Platzi and that definitely had a really -- I think it was Node, writing an API in Node... And it had a really broad audience. |
One of my current engineers who is from El Salvador in L.A. saw my Platzi course before he worked at Splice, which is just mind-blowing. |
There are several educational initiatives that are trying to get really good quality content in Spanish, and I really -- I support Platzi especially because they're already going after changing the way that people get educated in Latin America. |
The other portion - a lot of the initiatives in Latin America are interesting... One of the things that we did in Colombia and I'm really proud of is that we've always aimed to highlight the local talent, and not make it a conference where international speakers come to talk to us. Overall, we usually have a portion of... |
There's a really fun video of Alex's talk in Colombia, I think we should share the link because it's a really funny intro. But the aim has always been to connect, to bridge, and not to have the colonial approach of "Here we come to educate you." |
One of the founding principles of JSConf Colombia was that within the first five years we wanted to have one of our local attendees speak at an international event, and I think right now there's three of them who've spoken, who are attendees from JSConf Colombia locals, who have spoken internationally. We're really pro... |
**Alex Sexton:** The Argentina group does really well these days too, at JSConfs and things like that, I see... I went there, and then at the next JSConf I was like, "Oh, I recognize all these people..." So I think that even outside of bringing stuff to these places, which is helpful and helps give people access to thi... |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** I know a few people from the circuit that kind of started out in Argentina or Uruguay or Colombia... |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Argentina and Uruguay... I think the culture of the Southern cone of America is very different from the tropical area, and Argentina and Uruguay - you can see there's a lot of content produced in the Southern end of Latin America, much more than in the tropical region. I'm actually pretty jealo... |
\[12:12\] You have Pony Foo... There's a ton of React stuff, and of course, all the things that Guillermo Rauch does. It's pretty cool. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** What are the particular challenges of doing this kind of work in Latin America, community organizing in general? Because you've done a lot more than these conferences; you also do one of the largest JavaScript meetups in the world is in Colombia as well. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Yes... We've mostly tried - and I haven't done this work myself, so I have to highlight my co-organizers, because I'm in New York and I don't really do a lot of this stuff... But the objective has always been to give access and to include people who either are excluded because there's not enoug... |
We have the local meetups, which is how we started. After the first conference we did in 2011 in Bogota, we started Bogota JS, which is now five years old. It started as the first JavaScript meetup in Colombia, and then we moved one year later to Medellin, and then we moved to Calle... We've tried to motivate people to... |
We do something that's called the Empanada Offer, which is I personally offer to sponsor the Empanadas of your first meetup; I will pay for the soda, I'll help you find a venue, I'll help you organize that, as long as you commit to have the event, and find the speakers and adopt a code of conduct. That worked really we... |
We have 11 meetups in Colombia right now, and between Medellin and Bogota, which are always sort of like fighting at the top for membership, I believe we have 6,000 people in total between those two meetups. Right now, Medellin is larger - which I'm very proud of, because it's younger - and it's spread out... We've hel... |
Ultimately, the challenge is threefold. First, content - finding people who know a lot about JavaScript locally, who have had the experience to learn and then share it, is really hard. If you look at, for example, BrooklynJS or WaffleJS, or any of these meetups where every event is almost a conference, the quality of t... |
So finding people who have been given a chance at work to try something really innovative or to do a lot of stuff is hard. I think we'll have to continue to rely on international audiences for the majority of the innovative content. We're producing some good stuff. |
The other one is language - we try to fill during the events by having simultaneous interpretation and that sort of stuff, but it's always just challenging. You can't expect everyone to speak English; it varies a lot from country to country. I've also noticed it varies from community to community. I've helped the Ruby ... |
\[16:10\] I think the last one is resourcing. Local companies don't sponsor; the majority of the money that we usually get is from international companies. The local companies expect something in return immediately, like "Okay, if I give you $100, then what am I gonna get? Can I speak for 30 minutes?" There's a lot of ... |
Finding a venue is super tough. I think Bogota still after five years doesn't have a fixed venue; we've been trying to solve that. Even multinationals and the people who are evangelists for multinationals in Latin America have a very different culture perspective. I'm not gonna mention names, but a large software compa... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That kind of stuff isn't unheard of in the U.S. as well at meetups. There's just so many companies that you can usually find some that are thinking a bit more long-term than that and aren't trying to do something so sketchy. But I actually have been at U.S. meetups where they tried that kind of thing... |
**Alex Sexton:** And sometimes as an organizer you ensure that doesn't happen, and then suddenly someone's giving a 20-minute pitch on your stage, and you have to figure out what to do. |
Juan, is there an upcoming conference in Colombia? |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** There is. I think the event will happen in November - the 1st to the 4th November is the dates that we have the venue. We're opening the CFP right now today. JSConf Colombia right now has three confirmed guests. We're gonna have Tom Dale (I think some of you know him), we're gonna have Suz Hint... |
Then we're looking for workshoppers and speakers. We pay for travel, we pay for accommodation, we pay for your significant other if you're a new parent, and we'll also arrange childcare as well... So it's a pretty sweet deal. We're hoping that at some point we will be able to pay speakers, but we're not there yet; it's... |
The URL is cfp.jsconf.co. Please apply. I think it ends in June 11th or 12th. It'll be a blind CFP, and I recuse myself from judging, because I know how some people write... But it'll be pretty cool to have a broader audience. It's been super fun to have people come to Colombia, because we've been generally isolated fr... |
**Alex Sexton:** I had more than good food, but yeah... The food was very good. I really enjoyed JSConf Colombia. I haven't had a bad experience at any of the conferences in South America or Latin America, so I would encourage everyone to go to all of them. You're only kind of related... You started this a while back, ... |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** \[20:11\] I'm coming back this year. |
**Alex Sexton:** Oh, you're coming back... So you returned. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I retired... |
**Alex Sexton:** 44, MJ. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** Jenn Schiffer gave her last tech talk at JSConf Colombia 2014, and then I said that was the last conference that I was ever organizing (2015), but this year I just realize I miss it too much, and Catherine has also started spreading out to other events. Today, right now she's actually at a Scal... |
So Julian and I are going to be co-directors this year. I think the goal for this year is to get three junior organizers, who will be able to inherit the relationships, the sponsorships, all the stuff that we've built, which is what has allowed us to do them, and do a really nice hand-off over for next year. That's the... |
**Alex Sexton:** Oh, man... I just realized, as we come up on a need for a break, that the three of us organized conferences; I think maybe in a future episode we could talk more about the organize part and less about -- I think the Latin America conversation was much more interesting \[laughter\]... But the idea that ... |
I think a hundred percent of us seem like we could have benefitted from that... So keep us up to date on how that works out. |
**Juan Pablo Buritica:** I will, that's the plan. I tried to do it last time, but there's five main organizers and we wanna be actually conscious of passing it off and not just own everything, so... That's a plan. I'll keep you posted, definitely. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. Alright, we're gonna take a break real quick, and when we come back we're gonna talk a bit about all this JavaScript tooling that's out there. Stay tuned. |
**Break:** \[22:37\] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.