Re: COMMON - the week's over...

Hi Shannon,

I go to COMMON to teach, not to learn.

Sessions on a topic that I can learn from are relatively rare. Perhaps one or two each year is about all I can hope for. When they *do* pop up, I'm usually too busy to catch them at COMMON, so I'll catch them at one of the other half dozen or so conferences that I participate in.

I think if you look at my participation in these mailing lists, as well as my open source projects, the stuff on System iNetwork, etc, you'll get a good idea of my motivation: I really enjoy teaching people stuff, and I really love this community and want to help wherever I can.

And that's really why I participate in COMMON as well. To help the community. And that already costs me money out of pocket -- I don't mind spending money out of my pocket to help the community.

But, as with anything, there's got to be a limit. I can't afford to spend thousands of dollars AND spend hundreds of hours helping.

I wish I could, and I hope there's a resolution to this, because I really do want to keep participating and helping COMMON and the community.

FWIW... there's a similar discussion happening here (with Paris & Gantner's opinions)
http://ibmsystemsmag.blogs.com/idevelop/2009/05/the-future-of-common.html



Shannon ODonnell wrote:

Your company won't pay for your training/air/hotel fees Scott?

That's how most of us afford to go in the first place...our companies pay
for it.