Hi All
As mentioned, SAP have kindly agreed to sponsor the use of their internal
conference facilities to allow us to host an ApacheCon there. This should
allow us to run a more community style of event. Because we wouldn't be
based at an expensive hotel, and because SAP would be covering the
facility costs, we should be able to run something with a lower headline
conference fee, and a lower attendence cost.
There are some smaller things and some bigger things we need to consider.
First up, when would we want to hold the event? Largely influencing this:
What's the soonest we could be ready? (We will be constrained by when the
SAP conference venue we prefer is available)
Related to this, which of the two SAP sites would we prefer? Hopefully
Paul Gotez can let everyone know the details of the two possible sites.
(Paul is an Apache committer who works at SAP and who's been doing amazing
work getting the SAP approval)
Moving onto the bigger part, what sort of conference do we want to put on
in the space? Monday-Friday? Wednesday-Sunday?
Monady-Sunday/Saturday-Friday? How much should be conference sessions, how
much hackathons, how much meetups, how much barcamp / ad-hoc sessions? How
many people will we expect to come for all, and how many for just one day?
Ratio of talks aimed at users, developers, and those interested in open
source business/community/the apache way?
Feeding into this, I know quite a few people go to other community open
source events, and a smaller number help organise them. What works well?
What doesn't work? Who should we be learning from and emulating?
We also need to think about speakers, and generally about how to help get
enough members / committers / nearly-committers along to share knowledge
and teach the apache way. At the big hotel events, speakers have tended to
get a conference pass, hotel nights, and some flight help if needed.
People sharing knowledge in other ways just get cheaper conference passes,
but still need to pay lots for hotel rooms. With an event like this, the
conference fee should be much lower, and with no hotel attached people can
stay nearby wherever their budget permits. How much help do we need to
offer for speakers? And can that work with a lower registration fee, and
hence lower total budget?
And anything else I've missed that we'd need to consider? :)
Cheers
Nick
