I’m not the first and won’t be the last to comment on the topic of satisfying the overwhelming demand for WWDC tickets. My ideas is based on a few underlaying assumptions, and even includes possible variants.

Some assumptions:

• There is sufficient hotel capacity in the city
• Other parts of the Moscone or nearby convention facilities can be booked simultaneously

Attendees typically want:

• Session content
• Access to presenters after a session
• Access to labs and related non-session activities
• Be around and network with other attendees

While the rooms in Moscone West are at capacity, not everyone needs to be in those rooms at the same time, hence what’s really needed is to spread the people out across multiple sites. (e.g. other facilities). More attendees, but the same density of people with the same content and opportunities.

There is no reason the live sessions can’t be streamed live into other rooms. The big issue is access to the presenters after a session. Only a small percentage of people from a sessions want to talk to the presenter, which usually results in them being herded to the corridor to make way for the following session, and there is a fairly good chance you’ll know if you care enough about a topic before the presentation to decide if you may need access. Allowing people to choose a venue to view it from will ease the load and reduce the lines. Alternatively, the presenters could be made available at set places and times during the conference to assist those who weren’t in the room where the presenter was. The obvious alternative of holding numerous repeats of a session is still viable. Having developed and delivered training myself, the largest imposition is the time creating the content and getting to the venue. Presenting and being with the consumers is actually the enjoyable part. An extra hour or so to repeat the delivery or answer questions is negligible.

To satisfy demand for the labs and non-session activities, it wouldn’t be difficult to bring in additional Apple engineers or extend the time they are available, including making better use of the Friday, Sunday preceding the conference, and extended hours. This will require more time from Apple engineers, but it’s typically an incremental thing, and not a huge imposition in the larger context. The non-pre-booked lab activities are often undersubscribed in either room utilisation or demands on staff. The pre-booked activities should easily be scalable.

Being around and networking with other attendees is another large part of conference. Increasing the physical size of the conference will, certainly reduce some of the chance encounters, but a little additional organisation by attendees and Apple would help and definitely improve the current state of play. Additional birds of a feather sessions, a “Facebook” of attendees and Apple’s “Find Friends” app to help find people with similar interests and other technology would help. Making use the Moscone or other local facilities into the evenings or perhaps the Friday afternoon or following weekend can address a lot of the needs.

The typical agenda of many attendees is to sort out a list of issues or questions they have for Apple, absorb new content and catch up with and meet new people. My ideas go along way to help scaling the conference, even if it’s doubling or tripling the size.

I don’t subscribe to the tech talk tours as being an alternative because they only address some of the reasons people attend WWDC. I will part with $4,000 to attend WWDC for a week, but not a fractional amount required to cover air fares and hotels in a nearby city for a tech talk.

These approaches don’t scale infinitely, but would satisfy a lot more of the current demand than anything else, until “peak Apple” (think peak oil) occurs. There will be the current level of demand for at least a couple of years. Apple failed to act in the past year or two, when they should have, and upset a lot of people this year in the process. There is the risk of WWDC becoming less appealing as the conference becomes less obtainable, the community fragments or quality declines by overloading Apple. It still needs to be good for non-locals to part with around $4,000 to be there. I don’t envy the organisers.

As a separate issue, I would also like to see the facilities made available after the scheduled times for people to give their own “user contributed” talks or lightning talks. Having some non-Apple content while we’re present would be great. I wouldn’t want to see it displace Apple content, but there are certainly idle resources to make this possible, and once again spreads the attendees. Encouraging and providing the means for lightning or flash-mob style talks (e.g. soapboxes) is a tantalising idea. Twitter or App.Net are powerful tools to make this and Birds Of A Feather happen.

Excuse me if I come across as bitter and twisted, I’m still progressing through the seven stages of grief when I lost in the Apple WWDC 2013 ticket “raffle”.

Ticket sales for the premier Apple event of the year have become more hotly contested in recent years to the point of commercial notification services alerting the commencement of ticket sales. Historically, Apple made no pre-announcements regarding the dates of the conference or when tickets would go on sale, the details have always just magically appeared on the developer site around the same month each year. This behaviour cased many people to organise buddy networks, create site monitoring software, pre-book hotel rooms and more generally organise their lives around being near a computer for the inevitable moment that tickets went on sale.

Until a couple of years ago, the demand was low enough you had a number of days to notice or decide on a ticket purchase, but this has reduced to hours, minutes and now seconds. Being in Australia required the use of notification services as tickets would go on sale near midnight or the early hours of the morning. This worked well, until this year.

After disquiet from the US west coast last year when tickets went on sale at about 5:30am local time (how many Californian developers do you know that are functioning at that hour?), this year, Apple pre-announced ticket sales the day before and moved the opening sale time. This created the effect of gathering everyone interested to the one site at the same time. What could possibly go wrong?

When 3 am Australian eastern time rolled around, ticket sales began. The sale is a multistage process to verify developer membership and collect the $1600. Within a couple of seconds I was following the links and on my way to a purchase, until…

The website repeatedly buckled under the load – for some! While Apple had the foresight to take down the rest of the site in an effort to reduce load, it was never going to cope as anxious participants vied for the 5,000 tickets. The failures due to load actually surprised me given Apple’s track record regarding popular new product introductions.

Having two computers at the ready, I repeatedly tried to purchase a ticket as fast as I could – about every 10 seconds. Within just over a minute, the website froze and the “Sold Out” sign went up. That was it. I hadn’t felt my heart pounding that hard for quite a while. I continued to lurk for an hour incase further tickets became available. It wasn’t long before chatter on Twitter confirmed they had actually sold out.

A number of hours later, stories emerged of people receiving phone calls from Cupertino offering tickets to people that had been identified from the internal logs as being unable to complete the purchase due to the web site failures. My failures had been immediately after the ADC login so I got my hopes up. I decided to call Apple developer support in an attempt to verify this and possibly get a reprieve. The polite engineers on the phone took my details, but I never received a call. Apparently Apple was calling people all day, but I wasn’t one. Eventually I called back, but still no luck. The only thing left to do was to explain my grievances to their supervisor. I wasn’t as upset about not getting a ticket as much as the way it occurred.

Apple is notoriously secret so, like many others, I was on a hair trigger for a month with my website monitoring software altering my wife and I of web site changes, wherever I was in the world (apart from 30,000′ over the Pacific). This consumed a lot of time and induced some stress, but had been par for the course because this is the way it had been conducted in previous years. When Apple pre-announced the ticket sale the day before, I was mildly annoyed that all my efforts had been an absolute waste. (As a hint for Apple, perhaps you could have indicated it was going to be done this way earlier. They knew they had an idea many people were in this situation, we all got the alerts when analytics for the page were disabled and reenabled). That was the luck of the draw, but we had some certainty. I joked to friends about the movie titled “Gone in 60 seconds”. It turned out not being far wrong.

When tickets did go on sale, the web site didn’t fail for everyone, it was accepting new players for more than a minute before it sold out. I felt bitter and cheated because the web site repeatedly failed for me every time I tried, while there were tickets available and being snapped up by others. I wouldn’t have been so upset if the “Sold Out” sign came up by the time it was able to process my request – that would have been fair fight for those who were pounding on the refresh button then quickly clicking through the steps at the moment the sale began.

Apple had broken with their established M.O. only to make the situation worse and hence effectively not give weighting to the more dedicated individuals that valued these tickets more by putting significant effort (read time) into acquiring a ticket.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so naive, but I won’t be doing that again. My time is more valuable and life is too short.

I can think of some obvious solutions:

1. Resume the previous hair trigger system and let the die hards slug it out.
2. Continue with this years method, but have infrastructure that can handle tens of thousands of people simultaneously.
3. Accept entries over a period of time for a randomised or preferential lucky dip.
4. Do anything, but just don’t waste our time.

If you wondered why I’m kicking off my new blog with this public therapy session, it’s to have maximum chance the decision makers in Apple will become aware of the situation and what the people on the other end of their decisions go through. We have little to no insight into what they know about the situation. I was not the only one.