New year always brings this sort of sentiment of trying to recap what you’ve done during the year, with its ups and downs, lessons to remember and unforgettable moments.

Although I’m not a huge fan of doing it in my own life (Facebook’s
Year in Review doesn’t actually do a great job), I figured reviewing all that the sphere accomplished this past year was worth doing.

The core of what we do, the actual conferences, while known in general and people do pay attention to the ones which they might attend, the truth is that very few of us in the program see the whole picture around them.

ll be throwing out some numbers here. While there is obviously more data crunching to be done, these raw numbers will help me to provide the scope of how much work has been done. However, if anyone is willing to dig deeper into our numbers, it would be welcome.

Thanks to the hard work of every RC and the Conference Organizers, who for other than themselves are thrust into the spotlight, we had 56 conferences worldwide. Yes, 56. That’s even more than there are weekends in a given year. That’s even more than there are GPs worldwide during the year, and the GP schedule is already quite a busy one.

With 56 conferences, it’s natural to think that the number of presenters would not be a small number. There was a total of 594 presenters. This averages to around 10 per conference. These numbers are not quite accurate though and some thing must be kept in mind:

-This number doesn’t count for repeats in a single conference (if someone presented twice, I only got him/her counted once here)

-The inclusion of Leadership conferences in the mix which use a lower number of presenters (since they are more discussion based), bring the average down and these are not unique presenters.

Lastly, conferences would be nothing without you, the people who actually go and spend a day of your lives to learn new things and share some extra time with those from the community, the attendants! A total body count (not unique) of 3014 of you attended conferences this year. And this is still missing final data from 6 of them (which based on expectations, should bring us up another 400 people). This gives us an average of 60 attendees per conference but just as with the average number of presenters, the number is brought down by the attendance count of the much smaller Leadership conferences.

This is not all! 2014 also brought as a lot of behind the scenes work, particularly the introduction of this very blog, the official launch of the content blog, publishing of our (until then kind of internal or not very widespread) guidelines and documents for conference organization, the introduction of Leadership Conferences… Quite some!

I’ll try to do more work on these numbers, especially since I intend to see how this year went on compared to previous years. I didn’t want to let 2014 slip away too far before thanking everyone. I would like to thank the RCs, Conference Organizers, presenters, and attendants for being a part of the conferences. I would also like to thank everyone who works as part of the conference sphere day after day on the various projects improving each nut and gear in the machinery. The sphere’s big scene is largely ignored but now we get to look back and see how much we have accomplished.

May 2015 bring even more!