>For SWFox, there is no victim and it has been and most likely always will be an attempt by folks to continue to provide a place to learn and meet people who otherwise you would never have the opportunity to know in person not to mention the knowledge sharing that goes on outside of the conference sessions.

That's it exactly. We've said this since day one: the real purpose of going to a conference is networking: making new friends or renewing acquaintances.

One other thing I should point out: if SWFox goes away, probably so do the white papers it produces. Few people are going to spend the 40 hours it takes to write one without having a conference to present it at. Tamar, I, and several other speakers generally make our white papers freely available some time after the conference (in my case, at doughennig.com). If I didn't have SWFox or the German DevCon to present these sessions at, I really wouldn't have much incentive to write them. And the sad fact is that if we as organizers made all of the white papers available as a package right after the conference, it's likely fewer people would attend, even for the networking, because they could save the expense by just downloading the white papers. So, all free white papers = conference dies = no more white papers.

Doug