Plone Metrics: Plone Conference 2011 by the Numbers

And an exercise in "scientifically" locating the 2012 conference.

The numbers are in and San Francisco looks like this against the last five Plone Conferences.

Location	Attendance
2011 San Francisco	265
2010 Bristol	285
2009 Budapest	420
2008 Washington	350
2007 Naples	415
2006 Seattle	258

With Naples and Budapest looking so good, one is tempted to say that Europe is the more successful venue. I ran a Student's t-test in order to see if the two sample populations, Europe and North America, were significantly different. The null hypothesis is that there is no difference between the European and North American conference attendance numbers.

For the data above with a standard deviation of 65.1 and 4 degrees of freedom for the test, the t value was -1.55. The probability of this result, assuming the null hypothesis, is 0.196. This does not meet the usual 0.05 value for significance. We accept the null hypothesis that Europe and North America are the same.

World Plone 2012

The call for proposals for the 2012 Conference is out. Let's see what sort of trouble we can get in with the above table.

First, turn the cities into latitude and longitude coordinates, then calculate the average of all six venue locations weighted by attendance. The result looks like this:

The red 'X' indicates the location of the weighted average, the spot that maximizes attendance while minimizing travel costs. It's the perfect location for next year's conference.

There's only one problem... the actual location is in the middle of the North Atlantic:

The nearest land is either St. John's, Newfoundland or the Madeira Islands. St. John's has an October-November average high temperature of 6-11 C (43-51 F) and the remarkable beverage, Newfoundland Screech. Apparently, some of the best food in Canada is to be found there, plus I like snowshoeing.

Madiera, on the other hand, has an average Oct-Nov high temperature of 20-23 C (68-73 F) and a famous wine named after the island. One of the conference centers in Funchal looks suitable.