I'd like us to think a bit about events in the next 12 months.
I'm going to eventually put this into the project meeting agenda for
recording some kind of consensus, but for now this is half-baked.
One of the backdrops is that going forward CloudBees will be organizing
one JUC per year, at San Francisco, instead of doing 4 like we did the
past 12 months. From what I've been told, the main issue is that the
cost involved in running it is just too high (I saw one of the cost
summary and it's in the order of tens of thousands of dollars!)
Given that, I think we need to change the model here.
First, I think we need to run events cheaply --- as a case in point, our
friends in Japan organized Tokyo JUC a lot cheaply:
- we found the venue who's willing to host us for free
- we did video recording by ourselves and so that was free
- the conference was from noon to 5 so that there's no need to
cater food.
- the drink-up after the event was paid for by attendees who
opted in for that part.
Second, I find that it works better when the local people organizes the
event, like in Israel and Tokyo.
In this new model, I think the community could act as a facilitator ---
I think we want to put this model out there (so that we can find people
like Lars who's interested in driving one in their home city), and we
want to help those efforts so that they feel like a series of the same
event.
Maybe it starts with a mailing list to hook up people interested in
organizing one, with some Wiki pages to share the knowledge. Alyssa
thinks she can continue to help with the actual work (of handling CfPs,
handling money between sponsors and vendors, registrations, etc.)
I also think the Jenkins project should spend some of its budget on
those events, and this is another reason we need some guidelines.
One way I think of this is as a parallel to Jenkins CIA, in which we set
out some mechanism to encourage small local meet-ups and evangelism
effort. This could be a bigger brother to CIA that just requires more
commitment from those who are willing to do it.
I'm not sure how this fits into that FOSDEM thread I just started, or if
it needs to fit into this.
I appreciate any thoughts on this.
--
Kohsuke Kawaguchi http://kohsuke.org/
