UKUUG Ltd, the company behind UKUUG and FLOSS UK, has officially (and voluntarily) been struck off the register at Companies House, and therefore no longer exists as a legal entity. The websites haven’t been updated for a long time, with the UKUUG domain being taken over by a company that stuffed it with links to gambling sites.

I was involved in organising most of the conferences from 2007 to 2013, and served on Council (the governing body) for 6 years, including 4 years as chairman and a brief stint as interim treasurer when the previous office holder stepped down and we were trying to find a permanent replacement. I carried on attending afterwards, including giving talks – one of which won the Best Speaker award – and only missed the Spring conference when I was ill.

Part way through my chairmanship, we rebranded as FLOSS UK. This was controversial among some of the members, but we felt it was necessary to shift the focus somewhat and appeal to an audience who hadn’t grown up with Unix. It was moderately successful – the existing regulars continued to attend the conferences and we got a wider range of attendees at our unconferences.

I made a lot of friends at the conferences, and was very upset when some of them passed away later – always receiving the news too late to attend their funeral / wake. I miss the conversations I had with John Pinner (who I wrote an obituary for), Russel Winder (parallel processing before it was cool) and Simon Riggs (PostgreSQL and always first in line to get a round in at the pub).

There were a few downsides – in particular I’m disappointed that we never managed to improve the diversity of Council (all male during my chairmanship) and to a lesser extent the conference delegates. It’s very hard to improve when no one involved is from an under-represented group, because you don’t always know what the blockers are and everyone looks at your previous event photos and sees a sea of mostly white men.

I’m not going to give a detailed public commentary on what happened after I left – I don’t think it’s fair to carp from the sidelines and I hated it when a small group of ex-Council members tried to tell me how to run things (it was always unconstructive criticism rather than helpful, usually along the lines of ‘well I didn’t do things that way so you must be wrong’). All I will say is that conference attendance had been drifting down for some time, even before I left, and I think this is part of a wider trend I’ve noticed where people go to specialist conferences instead of generalist. For example, we used to get talks on topics covering what would now be called private, public and hybrid cloud, whereas now people will go to a dedicated AWS conference and only hear about AWS. I think that’s a shame, as there is value in being exposed to lots of different ideas, but it’s difficult to get attendees and sponsorship for a generic conference now.

Finishing on a positive note, here are some of my memories from my involvement:

• Being driven from Birmingham to Buntingford by John Pinner, who provided many entertaining anecdotes from his long career
• Being asked for proof of age in the pub, and one of the regular attendees telling the bar staff ‘you can’t ID him, he’s the responsible adult!’
• When there was no official social organised for the first night of the conference, the new chairman saying ‘just follow Paul’ (I found us a decent Indian restaurant)
• Opening a session at the Birmingham conference saying it was great to be in the UK’s second city… the first one being Manchester (this got a good laugh from the audience)
• Giving my ‘why PHP is great and all other languages suck’ talk for the first time

The things I’m proud of that we accomplished during my time:

• Every Spring conference had a full program, was close to capacity, and at least broke even
• Attendees came back year after year
• Many people got work either directly or indirectly from attending (including me)
• We gave people their first chance at speaking, who then went on to speak at other events
• Post-event feedback was always positive
• Friendships were made which continue today

Not bad for an organisation run by 6-8 volunteers and a part-time paid secretariat.