There has, to date, not been a single use of the academic discount code for ApacheCon. If you care about this then come to our BarCamp session on community outreach at ApacheCon - http://barcamp.org/BarCampApache
On the one hand the lack of academic registrations surprises me - there are many unis in the area and they claim to understand the importance of open source - they certainly use it a great deal. On the other hand it doesn't surprise me for the following reasons: a) it is massively expensive for academics (lets hope we get some academic folk to the freebies, but don't hold your breath) b) the academic sector does not understand open source - to the extent that major projects are usually funded under a hybrid model they call "community source" [1] and [2] c) there is almost no content of interest to the the average academic developer - they use Apache software but because of (b) they don't realise they can participate. Point a) is a difficult one to deal with in isolation since we want the prices to come down for everyone and the event has to be paid for somehow. Point b) requires a significant amount of outreach from the ASF. There is a huge amount of FUD in the sector, most of it born of a lack of understanding rather than malice (although a big-corp director recently accused my team of being biased towards the GPL in my ***non-advocacy*** day job advisory role. Quite amusing since my team, understandably, tell me I'm biased towards permissive licences and that is showing in our work). For point c) what we need is activities focussed on awareness of the way we do things. If we want people to understand how things work around here, we simply cannot expect people to read through our dodgy documentation and then jump into a mailing list full of confidence. Apache is a very scary place for newcomers, people on this list will not recognise that - we're already here and we've got over that hurdle. Take a look at an independent report from one of my recent day job events in this context - it happened that 2/3 projects speakers represented ASF projects but it was not an ASF event [2]. I intend to be doing a session on this at the BarCamp, so please come along and help figure out what we can do and, more importantly, what you can do to help. I feel pretty sure that some people will say "we don't need to do outreach" - that's fine, some of us think we do need to, so rather than standing in our way in this thread I politely request that you step aside and let us get on with it - it's not going to *hurt* your project (if I'm wrong in this then of course I would like to hear those thoughts). So see you at the BarCamp... Ross [1] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/communityvsopen.xml [2] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/communitysource.xml [3] http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2009/10/17/event-report-oss-watch-workshop-engaging-developers-with-open-source-projects/ -- Ross Gardler OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org
