Time goes by quickly. It’s already a year since the last Xojo conference hosted by Monkeybread Software. Since Xojo Inc. didn’t put up their own conference and I didn’t see someone else organize one and several people asked me about when the next conference is, I started thinking about making one. This would be my 14th.
The first option is to simply repeat the conference we had in Andernach. You know, a nice little hotel, that is very happy to get our business and provides reasonable prices. Located nearby our office we can easily organize it. The hotel would certainly enjoy to host us again. We may find a different thing to do on the evening event and try a few other restaurants.
We had conferences in bigger cities before: Berlin in 2017, Munich in 2018 and Cologne in 2019. The last of the four cities in Germany with over a million inhabitants and the next on the list is Hamburg. There we could pick a hotel somewhere in the inner city, maybe towards the harbor city.
Comparing Andernach to Hamburg, we have a few key differences. For Hamburg the flight would be more convenient as you would land in Hamburg airport and just take a local train to the city center. Much quicker than flying to Cologne or Frankfurt and taking various trains to Andernach. For the hotel rates, expect something like 150 €/night in Andernach and more like 200 €/night in Hamburg. The conference tickets in Andernach last year got quite low at 499 Euro for a regular ticket (plus VAT). In Cologne it was 699 Euro and Hamburg may be more in that higher area.
Doing a conference outside of Germany would be difficult for us. The handling of VAT or sales tax would be a challenge and previously we had a local partner in the UK to help us there. If someone likes to organize a conference in their home country, please let us know!
We currently look into potential locations and time frames for spring 2026.
Please let us know if you would be interested to join. Such a conference can’t happen unless we have people joining the conference and volunteers to fill a session. As before I would keep the MBS advertisement to my MBS session and leave room for other third party vendors to also present their products.
For the basic math, such a conference would have a minimum number of attendees that need to sign up until some specific date. e.g. 40 people at 3 months before. If the number of sign-ups doesn’t reach the minimum, the conference would be cancelled. So whether it happens or not depends on the community to pick up the chance and join.
We’ll discuss this on the Xojo forum and please let us know what you think about this. We’ll make a list and collect who is interested to come to a conference and who is interested to help with a session.
To check for demand, location and dates, we setup a survey. Please fill and/or contact us by email to let us know if you are interested to join, to speak or sponsor. The survey contains a few other locations, where a conference could be, so we’ll see how popular they would be.
