zlacker

In practice, it's often a bit hard to separate out single-vendor centric and broader tradeshows from more grounds-up community efforts. Certainly, there's a continuum from purely volunteer weekend jaunts to fairly non-commercial but nonetheless heavily corporate sponsored large-ish events. (I'll refrain from giving specific examples to avoid ratholing a discussion of specific events.)

I agree with most of the basic points. I find a lot of breakouts are more useful for letting me know about something that might be worth following up on than teaching me in depth. I zone out on a lot of demos pretty quickly; they have to be really compelling which is rare. One reason I'm generally a fan of shorter breakouts and keynotes.

The author also says that submittals are judged blindly (as in the name of the submitter isn't known). This isn't anything like universal practice though it may be more common with community events in the interests of supposed fairness. But IMO the reality is that the identity of the speaker should often factor in so long as the committee doesn't just pick "the usual suspects."