You may not be old, but I sure am.

As I travel around to all the different conferences to speak, whether we're talking a dev conference, SQL Server, or PostgreSQL, one of the topics that keeps coming up is age. The age of the organizers. It's mostly the same people putting on events for the last 15-20 years. The age of the speakers. Yeah, we do get some lovely younger people coming in all the time, but, to a large degree, if you look at a conference from 10-15 years ago and one today, same set of speakers. Attendees. It's safe to call these events family reunions because we run into the same people over and over.

I'm here to tell you, it's not sustainable. We're aging out. It's fine. It's the natural order of things. HOWEVER...

I know how much of my career I owe to participating in these events. As someone just attending, no networking at all, I received a ton of knowledge and better understanding to be better at my job. Now, toss in networking and suddenly I'm a force multiplier because I have friends I can call on to answer questions I simply don't have the knowledge to address. I don't organize events much any more, but I do help out around the edges. That's mostly about paying it forward. Speaking? That requires you to order your thoughts and get a topic under your belt in such a way that you can help others with it. Again, it increases your knowledge and your worth to any organization.

All this infrastructure is what I want to see passed on to new generations. They want it. They need it. But, for a whole slew of reasons, they're not showing up. We have to change that. It's not that they won't just rebuild something new, they will. The next generations of IT folks are every bit as capable as any of us were, maybe more so. But they communicate differently. They, somewhat, learn differently. It's not that I want to force them into our image or anything. Instead, I simply want to hand them the reigns. "Here you go, take it and run with it." It's a shortcut for them. They won't have to build the infrastructure. They can simply use our foundation to make their own edifice, saving some time and effort.

So my call to you is simple. You know one or two younger people in IT. A niece, or granddaughter, getting her start. Point them to the local meetups, Day of Data, pgDay, Hackathon, whatever. Explain to them the need for networking. Get them on the path. Encourage them to take over, take control, make it their own. Just get them to see the infrastructure we built so they can take it and something with it. I'd just hate to see it die, leaving nothing behind.

This should be our primary focus as mentors, organizers, speakers, and good stewards of what we built. Get the new blood in here.