> On Jan 27, 2017, at 6:18 AM, Rich Bowen <rbo...@rcbowen.com> wrote: > > (With apologies to people who have already seen this discussion > elsewhere. I figured more eyes on it was better.) > > As you might imagine, I've spent a LOT of time over the last 15 years > thinking about what ApacheCon is, and should be. Moving from a handful > of projects all in generally the same technology space, to 300 projects > across all areas of technology, has put a great strain on our ability to > produce a conference that is "about Apache", and have people actually > attend to it. > > I'd like to offer my vision for ApacheCon.next - something that we've > already been moving towards for many years, and which we want to make > the final leap to in 2018 - ApacheCon as a convention of Apache project > mini-conferences. > > In Miami this year, we'll be hosting CloudStack Collaboration > Conference, TomcatCon, and Flex Project Summit. We have room for one > more such event, if your project wants to have a dedicated, branded > track or mini-conference. In discussion on other lists, it looks like an > IoT mini-conference is shaping up, which I'm very excited about. > > Anyways, if you're still reading, and you are interested in where we see > ApacheCon going in the coming years, I've put together my detailed > thoughts here: > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RQeWtXo6Pn1C5mwu1zNQOMIXcvRYzLa4Y3yPiHK_vtA/edit?usp=sharing > and I welcome your comments.
I’m generally very much +1 on this, primarily because staying status quo is not viable. I’d say lets try this, and see how it works. As pointed out in the doc, this puts a bit more burden on the PMCs, and rightfully so. One worry would be that some (many?) projects don’t have such commitments and resources from the PMC / PMC chair? As an alternative, maybe there needs to be a group of Apache contributors that are willing to help such communities? The “wildcard” mini-conference seems reasonable, but I’d worry that it’d be a track without an audience most of the time (as the document succinctly points out). I’d personally recommend that such small projects *must* pool relevant projects together themselves, and if they can’t, they are not a good fit for ACNA. As an example, I’ve been working with the ATS (Traffic Server) and ATC (Traffic Control) to make a joint Summit for Miami. We likely need two tracks within that summit, with combined “Keynote” presentations during both days. That much said, I would have loved to see tracks which are less project specific, and more feature specific. Like, how to use H2 in the Apache Ecosystem. But, I’m not sure how the response was for that? If it seemed useful, would there be room for such “cross over” mini-conferences / tracks in this new proposal? Cheers, — Leif
