On 31.05.12 10:06, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 11:40 PM, Ross Gardler
<[email protected]> wrote:
...I think there is a need to define what this
conference is. Is it a developer conference, a user conference, a hacker
etc.
...
And it would be good to clearly differentiate with
http://jax.de/wjax2012/speaker/
Their tagline is "a conference for Java, Architecture, Agile and
Cloud" - maybe those of us who are familiar with that conference can
help steer ours so that it's clearly different instead of competing on
the same topics (or maybe at least competing on the same topics on the
same days, see http://jax.de/wjax2012/specialdays/ ).
WJAX is the sister conference to its big brother JAX (taking place each
Spring) and some other JAX events around the world. I've never been to
WJAX, but attended JAX for some years now as a speaker. (WJAX organizers
also edit JavaMagazin, where I'm writing a monthly
Apache-project-focused column.)
JAX is huge, with as much as 12 parallel sessions at a time for 3 days,
plus workshops on Mon + Fri. This can be overwhelming. WJAX has a
similar setup with 8 parallel session. So it should be about 2/3 the
size of JAX.
The foremost difference to ApacheCon is that WJAX is a German-speaking
conference all over the place. Only keynotes and few sessions are in
english. In this regard, it is not a European conference. You'll find
not many french, spanish or even swiss people there. Let alone british.
Attendees are mostly folks having to deal with "enterprise software", in
the sense that they often work for banks, telcos, car manifacturers, so
the conference pretty much covers what these people are interested in.
You won't find that many university students or people from very small
companies there, also because of the price tag.
New hot topics will eventually come to WJAX, like BigData this year.
Niche technologies like Lucene are only a niche at (W)JAX.
This also means that open source is seen very pragmatic at (W)JAX. If
some software is Open Source, that's ok as long as it solves their problems.
Speakers are competent and familiar with the topic, but not neccessarily
mega-deep into it. I've done two Hadoop talks at JAX, not being a
committer for any of the Hadoop projects. At BerlinBuzzwords this week
there were Hadoop committers all over the place - so I didn't need to do
a talk and could just listen, learn and meet. (bbuzz was great, by the way!)
So, when needing to contrast with WJAX, I would probably tag ApacheCon
EU like this:
+ pan-european
+ "meet the committers"
+ all the latest and greatest hot stuff from our projects
+ open source excellence
In the sense of Leslie Hawthorns great BBuzz keynote (see also
https://twitter.com/bdelacretaz/status/209612024244748288 ), we could
try to forster community in that projects are given the opportunity to
present their top five JIRA issues they need to tackle and the top five
issues suited for new contributors.
Bernd
