I am not fully agree with this. For me the direct purpose of code4lib (not of the conference, because I haven’t been there, but of the site, the listserv, the IRC channel and the journal) is to sharing ideas and practice, and this effects the daily work of code4libbers (at least mine life). But the grater effect on the whole library community is the improving quality of the softwares we wrote, and thus the hopefully improving quality of the library services. The wider audience of librarians does not care about the technical details of communication standards and Perl regex tricks, and it is not needed at all I guess. So it is the products which qualifies the effectivity of the community, not the size of the membership, according to my point of view.

Anyway: thanks for the travelouge!