The ASF has failed to produce a coherent ApacheCon strategy for years. That's why we killed ConCom and outsourced everything. It's not our role to define strategy. It's the producers.
The producer is relying o. Us to produce all content so what they are getting is the usual 2-3 talks for each of our 150+ projects. We end up with a conference with no coherence and potentially no compelling reason to attend. We end up rejecting valuable talks because they describe how a particular product benefits from the ASF, so no case-studies, just deep technical talks that are only interesting to developers of that specific project. We end up with no content of general interest. Of course I'm over stating it, its not quite that bad. However, it wont change until the producer is ready to build that missing strategy. I do understand why they are nit changing too much too quickly, but as someone who made this requirement explicit during the negotiation stage I had hoped they'd have at least given ApacheCon a vision by now. One I could communicate to speakers so that I could create a coherent track that would convince the bosses to approve travel. Lets not go down the path of us telling LF what event they should put on. We killed ConCom because it failed to do that and restricted the producer as a result. If someone here has a vision for a specific Apache conference the. Go ahead and do the work. ApacheCon is not the vehicle for a volunteer run event. Sent from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Pierre Smits<mailto:pierre.sm...@gmail.com> Sent: 2/4/2015 12:45 AM To: dev@community.apache.org<mailto:dev@community.apache.org> Subject: Why the Apachecon (was Re: ApacheCon NA CFP closed) We are discussing again, as it seems to me, what the purpose of the Apachecon is based on talks submitted. And why is that? It appears, at least to me as I have seen the discussions before, that the ASF misses a clear strategy regarding the event, why we do it and what the intended audience is. This should be fixed prior to opening the process for the next event (Apachecon EU 2015), because then it will be easier to communicate, easier to invite speakers (and yes, we should do that), and get everybody on board regarding helping out. Is the event to be considered as the bi-annual party for ourselves, where we can all (all the presenters) claim how good we (as the individual) are with the products of the various projects? Is it an promotion and networking event? Or is it something that sits somewhere in the middle? And how does it fit with the strategy and other activities of the ASF Offices and Projects? As soon as it is known what it is, we can investigate and define the target audiences and set up a plan to communicate with (our public information can be found in 20.700 pages found https://www.google.nl/search?sitesearch=apache.org&q=apachecon and the page listed first is related to the conference of 1998) , setup a plan to get the attracting talks in. And I presume, that will help increase the success of the event, the projects and the ASF. Now, I also surmise that we don't know the size of the potential audience. We talk about 500+ members, 5000+ committers. But we are forgetting the number of the other contributors (subscribers to dev@) participating in our projects and the followers of our products (subscribers to user@). These are also numbers we can use when promoting the event. Extrapolating the ratio of members vs committers we could say 50.000+ contributors and 500.000 followers. Communicating those numbers add to the importance of the event for sponsors, presenters and attendees. Let's face it: the event costs... It cost effort to organise, it uses precious ASF resources. And net-wise it should be beneficial to both the projects and the ASF regarding supporting the projects. Meaning adding to the budgets, or at least be cost neutral, and leading to more contributors to the projects. I must admit that I don't know the exact figures per event held (e.g. EU 2014, US 2013, EU and US 2012) and what has been learned and gained from each. Best regards, Pierre Smits *ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>* Services & Solutions for Cloud- Based Manufacturing, Professional Services and Retail & Trade http://www.orrtiz.com On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 9:52 PM, Ross Gardler (MS OPEN TECH) < ross.gard...@microsoft.com> wrote: > There is nothing stopping LF from promoting the CFP. > > Ross > > Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. > A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation > > -----Original Message----- > From: Phil Steitz [mailto:phil.ste...@gmail.com] > Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2015 12:38 PM > To: dev@community.apache.org > Subject: Re: ApacheCon NA CFP closed > > On 2/2/15 11:47 AM, jan i wrote: > > On 2 February 2015 at 19:30, Jim Jagielski <j...@jagunet.com> wrote: > > > >> Agreed! > >> > >> Also, after all is said and done, and Rich has some time to breathe, > >> I'd like to know just how helpful LF was this time around. From the > >> sidelines, it seems that they really didn't do an aggressive job > >> promoting the event and being a pro-active producer in trying to > >> drive speakers. > >> > > Being one who tries to do a little more than just help, I think we > > need to divide issues here. > > > > Content is our responsibility, as I believe it rightly should be, so > > finding and driving speakers is our part, of course with the help of LF. > > > > Promoting an event before the content is known is pretty hard and not > > very rewarding. The real (external) promotion start 14th February, > > when the schedule is in place (work which just started today). > > Right. One thing that might help would be to push back the CFP close > date, so there is more time between content selected and the event itself. > > Phil > > > > All that said, I believe in general we should look for ways to > > motivate our projects a lot more to participate (not only with talks, > > but also getting people to come). > > > > just my opinion > > rgds > > jan i. > > > > > >>> On Feb 2, 2015, at 11:11 AM, Ross Gardler (MS OPEN TECH) < > >> ross.gard...@microsoft.com> wrote: > >>> Great job Rich, and those who helped. > >>> > >>> Sent from my Windows Phone > >>> ________________________________ > >>> From: Rich Bowen<mailto:rbo...@rcbowen.com> > >>> Sent: 2/2/2015 12:19 AM > >>> To: dev<mailto:dev@community.apache.org> > >>> Subject: ApacheCon NA CFP closed > >>> > >>> Thanks so much for people that got their last-minute papers into the > >>> CFP system. We currently have 235 proposals. It is still to be > >>> decided how many tracks we're going to run, but 6 tracks would be > >>> (roughly) 108 talks, just for reference. So we should be good. > >>> > >>> If you've volunteered to review, you can start any time. If you'd > >>> like to review and aren't in the system yet, email C. Craig Ross > >>> <c...@linuxfoundation.org> and ask to be added to the CFP review > >>> system, and cc this list, so that we have some idea of who's being > >>> added to the list. > >>> > >>> We have 2 weeks from today to get the talks (tentatively) scheduled > >>> and notify speakers on the 14th, so there's a lot of work ahead of us. > >>> Thanks in advance. > >>> > >>> -- > >>> Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com - @rbowen http://apachecon.com/ - > >>> @apachecon > >> > >
