I'm writing this because the more we are, the more fun we get and the more cocoon will grow and the more fun we can get in the future.
Gee, thanks, Stefano. That was a pleasant surprise. :-)
As the person who organized this last year, and who, after careful consideration, decided to 'give the event away' to a larger organisation, and who is now frantically reloading the attendee counter page, please allow me to step forward and express some of my thoughts:
- people attract people, so for sure the lengthy registration period last year helped with attracting lots of attendees. Since the event is now carefully scheduled away from ApacheCon, the preparations had to be starting during the summer, which, as you all know, is a great period for planning (not).
- because it was free last year, we had 115 registrations, of which however 25 didn't show up. People who were there will remember the huge amount of leftover toasts and sandwiches near the end of the evening reception.
- this year however, things have changed. Due to the financial loss my company incurred after the first GT (you'll hear no complaints from me about that, since it was well worth it, exactly because of the things Stefano mentioned), I decided to 'give the event away' to a larger organization. There's two benefits to that: the GT can survive me and my company, and we can start travelling around Europe.
- the way Orixo cooperates on this, is through some sort of insurance service. Outerthought still pays the bills and all that, but when we incur losses, they will be split across the participating companies. We do not - repeat: do not - intend to make money over the GT, ever. Also, we carefully budgetted the registration fee to back that claim.
- given these thoughts, and the hope that the event would grow bigger during its second year, we went for a larger venue, which is also more easily accessible than last year. I paid them a visit this morning, and took some snapshots during that: http://outerthought.net/~stevenn/GT2003Venue/GT2003Venue.html.
- surely you shouldn't come because it is held in a beautiful historical building (although I'm sure this will add to the GT atmosphere). You should come because you want to learn about Cocoon and its community.
- my personal pet-peeve-worry is that _users_ of Cocoon are afraid to register since they fear the GT is for hard-core-geeks- or committers-only. I urge you to take a look at the program, and change that perception (if it exists at all). As many people told me last year: they learned more about Cocoon during that one day, than by spending a year on the mailing lists.
I hope I didn't waste too much time with this plea, and I really hope that the GT becomes an annual tradition for us, Cocoonies.
If you have anything to say about this, please contact me, on- or off-list.
Warm regards,
</Steven> - no hats, just being myself ;-) -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
