In reply to Jeff Chandler.

Good ideas. It seems like mostly good problems -- information is messy but it's better to have more than less, even if it's noisy. The discussion that follows is where listening and learning can happen. The Tavern does a good job of this for the most part, I think.

Personally my reaction to the conference fee was confusion -- it sounded like a non-issue so I wondered if a post was just amplifying drama, but then I realized in the comments that the topic drew out a lot of different perspectives on conferences and professionalization. So I thought that in itself was valuable.