Well, the conference is during a week while most of us are in class. That may be one of the major factors influencing the lack of academic registrations.
-- Jeffery Painter > 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 > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org
