Depends a lot on the type of event, besides of the location of an event. There are a lot of community-focused events where people truly want to learn new things together.
But on the other end of the spectrum, there are (way too many…) events where the main focus is on the sales engineering. As a Wikipedia article describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_engineering
“… selling in these markets cannot depend on consumer-type sales methods alone, and instead it relies heavily on technical information and problem-solving to convince buyers that they should spend money on the seller's products or service”
For many event organisers, tech events are a way to increase their own visibility in the job market (or increase the amount of sales they do). Even in the situations where there are a lot of good people attending the events, too often the main focus is still on the presentations, instead of people collaborating and creating things together.
Potential improvements:
— Ability to find items from the event directory with a search field.
— Ability to filter items (groups / events / etc.) based on a type. For example, “show only groups with recent events” as a way to put the relevant content to the top of the list.
— Stop using “jumbotron” CSS element in the top, because it wastes a lot of room from the actual content of the service.
— Redesign (maybe with a card layout?) to modernise the visual layout. Tachyons http://tachyons.io/ has some building blocks to start with… (even if you decide to keep the old Bootstrap -based structure in the beginning of a rewrite).
Have more ideas and know ways to make things better, if needed.
But on the other end of the spectrum, there are (way too many…) events where the main focus is on the sales engineering. As a Wikipedia article describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_engineering
“… selling in these markets cannot depend on consumer-type sales methods alone, and instead it relies heavily on technical information and problem-solving to convince buyers that they should spend money on the seller's products or service”
For many event organisers, tech events are a way to increase their own visibility in the job market (or increase the amount of sales they do). Even in the situations where there are a lot of good people attending the events, too often the main focus is still on the presentations, instead of people collaborating and creating things together.