Congo - an upcoming Conference Management Tool

While we absolutely love running GopherCon, one thing jumps out as the most troublesome aspect of managing a large conference: managing the data. There are nice commercial solutions, but they charge pretty high fees. There are some open source solutions, but they’re generally older and abandoned. There are some hybrid solutions that are free for smaller conferences and expensive for larger ones.

We’re Programmers, Right?

Erik and I have been threatening to write a conference management tool ever since we started on GopherCon 2014. Our mish-mash of Asana, spreadsheets, ticket management software, Google Docs, two different CFP tools, credit card processing libraries, and external integrations drives us crazy on a daily basis. Each of the solutions on their own stand up nicely. For example we use Tito for our ticketing platform. Tito is great, but it has no external API, so we’re confined to exporting our data as CSV. We’re ready for something more. So we started on Congo. Congo was just born so there isn’t much there other than some wiki pages and a lot of open issues.

Ambition

Our requirements list on the wiki reads like the spec sheet for a two year long project. We’re realistic about what we can really accomplish – even with lots of help from the Go community. But we’re also excited to start making headway on something that will hopefully make a big difference for others who love their communities as much as we love Go. So we’re scratching our own itch, and with any luck we’ll be dogfooding as much as possible with GopherCon 2016. That means we might be able to get rid of some of the paid services we use that charge a per-attendee fee. Lower per-attendee prices for us means lower ticket prices for you!

Open Source

We’re starting Congo as an MIT licensed Open Source project. Free to use, free to fork. We believe in the power of open source software, and have certainly benefited from the goodwill and great programming of others. All of our websites are powered by Caddy which automatically updates our sites when they’re updated on GitHub. The sites themselves are generated by Hugo which makes it dead-simple to add new content. These tools and more are inspirational to us, because they’re great examples of people (Matt Holt and Steve Francia) who had their own itches to scratch and shared the solutions with the world.

Follow Along

We’ve got a skeleton application started on GitHub now, and we’re moving fast. Our aim is to be as friendly as possible to contributors, especially those new to Go. We’ll have mentors available to help new Gophers contribute features and fixes. Jump in, the water is great!