On Fri, 4 May 2012, Rich Bowen wrote:
On 2012 5 4 07:04, "Goetz, Paul" <paul.go...@sap.com> wrote:
However: The only other option left would be CW43 = 20-22 November -
and this is clashing with US Thanksgiving. So moving the event to late
November would more or less exclude US committers...
Although I have no wish to be excluded, EU events should not be planned for
the convenience of US attendees. Thats only bitten us in the past. Ignoring
JAX seems like a bad idea, and ultimately a bigger deal.
SAP are kindly sponsoring us the venue and for some food, which is amazing
and gives us a chance to try something different, but sadly does mean we
don't have quite the same range of possible dates as when we're paying a
few hundred thousand to a hotel...
I'm not an American, and I don't live there, so the thanksgiving thing
doesn't affect me personally. However, my hope is that we can try out some
new ideas and formats in Europe, and the North America conference can
learn from that. (The event in Europe will be smaller and cheaper, so we
should have more chance to experiment and innovate) If we clash with
thanksgiving then we'll loose the bulk of our American attendees, which
likely means we loose both those with experiences of organising past
ApacheCons, and we loose much of the chance for the organisers of the next
one to learn from us.
I completely agree that clashing with JAX isn't great, and will cause us
to miss out on some German speaking attendees, which is a huge shame. (Am
I right in thinking that it's all in German, so we won't loose any other
European language groups?) It's very hard to judge the two, but my feeling
was that loosing all the Americans (especially the ACNA13 team) would be
worse. I could be wrong though (it does happen!), so if you think we've
weighed the two up wrong please explain why!
Nick
