there must be a hell of a lot of developers in the West Midlands. Where are they?

Sorry for the dodgy markup in the previous post – I’ve been spending too much time with vBulletin lately. Should have been <em>…<,/em> of course

That’ll teach me to keep on top of my feeds… oh hang on, the only one who seems to have mentioned anything about it [I]before[/I] the event was Jon Hicks, back in June. I guess I need to keep on top of my telepathy.

Anyway, it sounds like it was a good one, and I’ll be checking out Dragonfly ASAP

Thst is absolutely the case, I think. I know of loads of local developers who didn’t go to Geek in the Park, which was absolutely free. Either they didn’t know about, or simply couldn’t be arsed on a Saturday night.

Conversely, some people had come from as far away as the Wirral, Manchester etc

Idea number 1, though, is one of the reasons why people don’t do this: it is distinctly unglamorous. You don’t get to speak at conferences, to gain the respect of your peers, to have people talk about you in admiring terms, to push the envelope or to build th state of the art. Since the whole web community runs on ego-gratification (well, there’s money in it too for our freelance brethren, and I confess that there’s also the desire to Do It Right in an altruistic sense), that’s a fairly major motivating factor yanked out from under those who want to appeal to dark matter developers.

Nonetheless, a few thoughts.

Dark matter developers don’t care about their job when they’re not at it. They don’t read blogs, they’re unaware of trends in the industry, they don’t really know what RSS is, they’re unaware of validity and the point of it, they’re Internet Explorer users who may have heard of Firefox but almost certainly haven’t heard of Opera. They don’t go to conferences or join local meetups or use Twitter. As far as I’m aware, they have two, and only two, points of contact with what we’d call the web community: books (and that infrequently), and the tools they use. This means that reaching out to this rather disconnected group either involves creating a new way to talk to them, writing a new book which everyone reads (unlikely, since people doing the job already think they know how to do it and don’t need new books), or adapting their tools. To my mind, the thing that needs to be done is _not_ to use these channels of communication to teach people web standards. Instead, use them to bring dark matter developers into the web community. That’s a significantly more impactive thing to do; once there, the rest of the education happens by itself. Don’t try and teach the Right Way to dark matter developers; instead, _stop them being dark matter developers_.

I can lay out thoughts later this week in the pub.