Dear Andy,
I find this email chain, like the barcelona conference, extremely sad. I went to the conference hoping that I could tell my employer that Smalltalk is alive and strong. The conference like this email shows it is weak and divided. ... I'm stuck on VA which still lacks Unicode support.
As regards this email chain, I mostly agree - it has become long without achieving much focus. (But perhaps one or more of the positive suggestions will turn into something.) Next year's conference is in Edinburgh and will have, amongst other things, - a stronger VA presence (you are aware that Instantiations has hired and has increased its focus on Smalltalk) - an increased focus on pre-conference advertising to make the outside world aware of us, get more newbies / ex-Smalltalkers in How well it will work, I don't know, but we're certainly going to try. While my summary is less harsh than yours, I was aware of the features at the Barcelona conference that you noticed. - Were you at Brest or Amsterdam? - In these difficult times, the Smalltalk activities of the major vendors, far from collapsing, are in fact doing well. That is worth noting. Meanwhile, whether you come or not, I hope you like the poster for the ESUG 2011 conference, available in hi-res JPEG and PDF at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7726739/ESUG_Promo.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7726739/ESUG_Promo.pdf and can display it, if only for the picture of Edinburgh, which I think is pretty good. Yours faithfully Niall Ross ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________