With all due respect, that's a hipster-like perspective. Those of us who are attending Hope shouldn't see ourselves as part of an in-crowd and shut others out. People in the security / tech communities are spreading word of this talk because it's important and relevant to them. As the other commenter pointed out, it's great for Hope to sell more tickets and receive broader support.
...You really do, more people will find out about Hope, more people will thus want to come to HOPE. Thus growing the community. Most people don't know what HOPE is, even people in the hacker community.
A lot of people know what HOPE Is. The problem is HOPE only happens every two years. Everyone knows what Defcon & Blackhat are & go to those conferences instead. There are large differences between the style, methods & ideals of the conferences, as well. The problem is, the venue is already very packed as is, they sent out an e-mail saying they had to close down their pre-registration because of the interest in the conference.
As we are now less than one week away from the biggest HOPE conference ever,
the time has come to close down our discounted preregistration service. This
is necessary in order to ensure that everyone gets their tickets emailed to
them in plenty of time. Due to the nature of this year's program and the
increased interest level overall, we can't guarantee that we won't reach
capacity at the hotel. Those of you who have preregistered are guaranteed
entry to the conference. If you have not already done so, we advise visiting
http://store.2600.com/hopextickets.html before the day is over.
Yes, but they won't go to a larger venue. They've had a solid relationship with Hotel Pennsylvania for a long time. Who knows. You'd think with two years between conferences, things would be run better too. There isn't really much to do there, it's kind of left to the attendees. In addition, the fact they only have one main freight elevator to go up & down to the floor with the talks is ridiculous. They would be much better served somewhere like the Jacob Javits center.
I bought tickets myself two weeks ago before the Snowden announcement, but there is no way I would actually stay in the Hotel Pennsylvania. If HOPE cares so much about attracting more people, they're going to need to lean on the owners to invest more in that shithole if they want to stay there.
I've never really understood that. Do they love this venue because it's so central to NYC or what? They've been there for years (out of the many HOPE conferences, this one will be only my second) and there was a time where they feared the hotel would be shut down or sold or something. What gives? :\
There are a limited number of tickets, and then the event's full. 2600 would understandably like to sell all of the tickets to avoid some extreme financial difficulty they're in. You'd like them to avoid that?
