it's not clear whether talks are 30 minutes + question time (and fighting-with-the-projector time), or 30 minutes total.

The sole purpose of any conference is to match the right speakers with the right attendees. That is when magic happens and communities truly grow and become stronger.

However, there is an issue when demand for a conference outstrips supply of tickets. CascadiaJS (like many JSConf conferences) strives to create a deliberately intimate environment for its attendees and speakers. This means smaller venues and fewer tickets.

Our current solution is to sell multiple batches of tickets during documented windows of time. The earlier you buy a ticket (before speakers and other details are announced) the cheaper they are. If you're not on your computer, attempting to buy a ticket during the prescribed window, they will likely be sold out by the time you show up. This is our attempt to allocate tickets to those that care the most about attending. We are using "attention" (attention to email, attention to Twitter, setting reminders, etc) as a proxy for desire to attend the conference.

But perhaps there is a better way. Some have suggested a lottery would be more fair. What do you think?

As a first time visitor to Vancouver, I need advice from the locals on where to eat and what to see!

• If your mom was in town for just two days to see all the sights, where would you take her?
• If your cool friend was in town for the weekend, what would you recommend for eats?

Something along the lines of http://sassconf.com/pages/nyc-primer/ would be awesome. Thanks!

As a husband to an amazing wife and a father to two beautiful daughters, I am very invested in getting more women involved in the developer community, both online and offline. This is sometimes considered the "third rail" of developer community discourse, and I am not trying to make any broad statements or offer any broad solutions.

I am, however, the curator for this conference. I care deeply about the talks that are going to be given. They are the single most important reason that people attend a conference, and the curation of these talks are the single biggest way that I can add value, or subtract it if I do a poor job.

I believe that in order to maximize the odds of finding 20 amazing talks, I should cast as wide a net as possible and get as many different perspectives possible. Some of the best talks I've seen as an attendee have come from people who were "unknown" to the broader developer community. Some of the worst were from "celebs".

I also know, based on the data in this repo, that the overwhelming majority of the existing proposals are by men. I feel that this is not an accurate reflection of the available pool of female developers who might be interested in giving a talk at CascadiaJS. Therefore I feel like there is a communications failure: I have not worked hard enough to reach women who code via the channels that they are on.

Some people might think that by tweeting at @WomenWhoCode, I am displaying a preference for female speakers or that I would compromise our selection process to favor proposals from women. This is not the case. Our selection process is completely identity-blind (name, gender, etc) and focuses purely on the abstract submitted.

Thanks for reading this far, I'm eager to hear what people think of this. And please help us spread the word about the CFS for CascadiaJS 2013, it closes on 8/15!