I originally posted the content of this note in two different slack conversations. I have decided to combine them and place them on the mailing list for wider distribution.
I believe that there are two issues that are retarding the acceptance of ASF produced conferences - The name - The positioning The name is an issue. You tell a potential sponsor or attendee or other interested party that you are working on a "Community over Code" conference and there is a blank look. You have to tell them it is the ASF conference that replaces ApacheCon. Then they may be interested, but often you will hear something like "I'm looking for technical conferences, not community building". If you then follow up with: "This is the technical ASF conference", perhaps they will come. But you have already had to clear two hurdles. How many potential sponsors or attendees didn't ask questions at the first hurdle and decided Community over Code was not for them? How many left at the second hurdle because they thought it was a community building focused conference. (Some will argue that all conferences are community building). So before you get a chance to tell them what a great conference it will be, an unknown number of people and organizations have turned away. I don't know how to measure that loss but I suspect that it is large. Renaming the conference to "The ASFConference" or "ASFCon" would go a long way to mitigating this problem. The positioning is an issue. There are lots of conferences that talk about specific ASF projects and the "best" ways to configure and run the tools -- These are end user focused conferences and often come with names that include the word "Summit", or for smaller conferences "Meetup". There are a fair number of conferences that discuss software development at the "gnats eyeball level" (e.g. https://algo-conference.org/2024/) There are very few conferences that discuss medium level developments that may be applicable across projects. I found that ApacheCon (I have not attended a C/C NA) felt like a collection of siloed conferences. If there were 15 tracks it could just as easily have been 15 meetups. It felt to me that there was very little cross pollination. I feel that if the ASF Conference is to retain its relevance it needs to focus on being a developer first conference that emphasizes application blocks that can be used across projects. To do this would require an approach that is orthogonal to the way we have always done it. To whit no more project specific topics but topics that are of interest to multiple projects: not groovy, or cassandra, or kafka; but JVM language scripting, cluster consensus strategies, and streaming data strategies. Become the conference that developers want to attend because they are going to learn something that will be applicable across the projects and products they work on. Be the conference that employers will send employees to because those employees return as better developers. Note: I speak of developers but I include all contributor categories like documentation specialists, testing specialists, graphic designers, etc, in that category. Basically anybody that contributes to the development of a project. In terms of funding, I think there are lessons to be learned from Sci-Fi and comics and other fandom based conferences. You don't have to charge a lot at the door. For example MileHiCon a large literary science fiction conference in Denver is currently charging $54 for ages 12 and up, free for 11 and under for all three days. You don't have to have large scale sponsors. When I worked on MileHiCon the funding came from selling "vendor tables". Currently those go for $125 - $375 (see https://milehicon.org/perennial-fixtures/vendors-room/). If the ASF can produce a conference that small scale vendors want to attend, the vendor space will sell out. The ASF conference should become the place where developers want to go to learn stuff, where employers want to send employees because they will return with new ideas and better approaches to problems, and where vendors of tools for developers want to be. I think it is possible, but not if the conference continues to compete with large scale siloed "Summit" conferences. Claude
