Hey Meno,

Thanks for your post and thoughts. In the discussion on the voicechat I was a bit overwhelmed, not only because it was midnight, but also by unreasoning and blatant lies and untruths being thrown in my face, by some participant(s). It really felt like a personal attack on many levels, without me having the chance of being able to respond to one thing, before getting another issue being thrown at me. I want to thank you for coming in the storm and cooling it down and going back to the facts, like you are also doing here. #LetsAdult, that is a good hashtag indeed.

I would say the more the merrier events. And btw I think there are already quite a bunch of Steem events out there.

I initiated SteemFest 2 years ago and I explain how it came about here: https://steemit.com/steemfest/@roelandp/save-the-date-steemfest-1-11-12-13-november-2016-amsterdam-nl In which I even paste my email to Ned & Dan (by that time still onboard) about it.

The idea is to bring as many of the community together. It is really something to see that one person from 10,000 kms away and spend a couple of days with them. And yes, local meetups are great too, but this one is then more globally oriented. At last years edition, people from every contintent flocked together in Lisbon, in total 38 countries or 39 even.

Another part of the concept of SteemFest is: have it moving around, and have the conference itself also move around in the city it lands on: Having a conference is ok, but then you travel all the way to this city you have never been to and then you are locked up in a hotel for 3 days for the conf and then go back to the airport to fly back home. What fun is that? I like to offer the combination of the joy of travelling to a place with the joy of meeting people. This is why I try to have as many venues as logistically and logically possible in the event. IMHO that keeps the whole thing fresh day by day and entertaining, and gives a bit of that travel feel into the o-so-often static conference event type. If there was such a thing as a SF Cookbook, that should definitely be in it.

For SteemFest I've thought about picking up the pace to 6-8 months or something but in the end withdrawn that idea, because it would mean people would have to pick "which one to go to" and hence divide the community, which I would rather not with this event.

Part of the success of the event I think is that it doesn't occur every other day and you really live up to it. But that doesn't mean their can't be more events like SteemFest. I mean there is also a Lollapalooza and a Coachella and a Burning Man, all unique by their own identity, name (!) and organisation behind it.

So yeah, maybe there might be a "first mover advantage" that people now got drawn to SteemFest, but obviously there is no lock-in, and should the past events have been absolute crap, I'd say no-one would ever consider going to another one either. I like to organise events, I've done so in the past for a fulltime job at TodaysArt.org and parttime several local hackathons and with everyone I give my heart and soul to it. I work by the mantra "the devil is in the details" and am a true perfectionist.

Having said that, everyone is free to organise events, right? And everyone is free to find sponsors. I just don't like it if the name SteemFest would be used, because I would like to keep that name for this "Steem Olympic" as someone called it in the voice chat. By this I don't mean to say that there can't be multiple "Olympic"-quality Steem events co-existing, just that they don't blatantly take the name SteemFest and stick it on their event. It would dilute the meaning of the event. It would be the same as: "Oh wow so many people like this drink, let's make a drink ourselves and call it the same". Using the name would mean abusing the efforts done by me and all people helping. I think that would be unfair.

Leaves me to say that I am still quite caught by surprise, that an idea that popped up when doing the dishes in this house-sitting house here near the beach (where I am at this summer again), gained so much popularity that it makes so many people have so many opinions about it. And not all positive.

That is completely new to me and forces me too behave differently in responding to those. I simply can't make everyone happy, but I will continue to try my best with all my dedication.

Some great Steem events are coming up btw:

• SteemCreators & SMT Summit, USA / Can (?)
• SteemStem / Utopian, Italy
• SteemCamp, Germany
• SIN, Nigeria
  -SteemFest, Poland!

Thank you, Roeland