HOPE TICKET SALES UPDATE

As many of you know, tickets recently went on sale for the next Hackers On Planet Earth conference: HOPE XV to be held July 12-14 in New York City.

For a variety of reasons, we're lagging behind where we need to be in order to make the conference as good as we want it to be.

While the new location isn't in midtown Manhattan, the overwhelming response to our first conference at St. John's University was so positive that we didn't think that was even an issue anymore. We updated our travel section to show just how easy it is to move around the city and how the new location is actually more convenient for most travelers.

We've already confirmed our first lodging deals, some of which offer decent rooms below $100 a night (in New York City!) and we are working on adding many more options.

At A New HOPE in 2022, we were also new in the neighborhood and we were still finding our way around. Now we're quite familiar with where the good food places are and how to quickly get to them. We've added this info to our website and we'll be constantly expanding that, as well as adding more on-campus options.

HOPE is in a place where great things can happen. We have the support of a major university, access to infrastructure that actually works (not always the case at the late Hotel Pennsylvania), and as much space as we could possibly want. But in order for any of that to happen, we need the support of the hacker community, both attendance-wise and participation-wise. That is how HOPE has always made history and how we intend to continue doing so.

We will make HOPE work regardless of how many people attend. One of the first rules of hackers is to adapt to the environment. With your support, this conference can be truly great and the beginning of something really spectacular.

Ironically, some of the challenges we're facing in getting the word out appear to be because of technical issues that we have no control over. Our own staff have encountered problems with Gmail sending crucial coordinating HOPE emails to spam folders. We can only imagine how many of our attendees haven't received notifications of tickets going on sale. While one solution is to simply whitelist email from hope.net or 2600.com, it's a real challenge to communicate this if our emails are being blocked.

Additionally, social media is very different than it was two years ago. To say it's become fragmented is an understatement. Where we once had very strong engagement on Twitter, today any engagement on that platform is negligible. While we have a presence on Mastodon and Bluesky, we're far from achieving the same level of visibility we once had. Marketing ourselves has always been one of our shortfalls, so we have to rely on word of mouth to spread the news while we try and get better at this.

We're used to challenges at HOPE and 2600, whether they be increased costs, a global pandemic, our hotel being torn down, corrupt magazine distributors, disappearing bookstores, or catastrophic changes in digital magazine policy at companies like Google or Amazon. But we survive because of one constant: you. Our readers and attendees have always been there for us and have helped ensure that we will continue to be there for them.

Buy a ticket to HOPE XV

Buy a virtual ticket to HOPE XV

See the HOPE XV Call For Participation

Learn all about HOPE XV

Follow our new HOPE accounts on Mastodon, Bluesky, or our old one on the remnants of Twitter.