Hi Kohsuke and devs, thanks a lot for bringing up this topic.
By direct encouragement from Kohsuke I will contribute to this thread.
Just to set the context of my comment: Like CloudBees we (Praqma) have
our business model based pre-dominantly around Jenkins CI. Where
CloudBees focus on PaaS, we have our focus on business driven, sponsored
Open Source development and consultancy services related to tool support
of software development and verification processes (with Jenkins Ci as
the natural hub). We strive to support the Jenkins community in any way
we possible can. So besides our contributions to the pool of plugins we
also found it natural to help organize and fund some of the more costly
community activities - such as events.
CloudBees and Praqma entered a formal partnership a few month back. At
about the same time where we had our first vision of a Jenkins User
Conference in Copenhagen. We have debated the format of such a CPH user
conference together with CloudBees: Should it be an official JUC event
(just another city along with Paris, New York, San Fransisco and
Antwerp) and simply squeeze it into the program as with Herzelia and
Tokyo or should it be a CIA event. Or something in between?
As you may have noticed we had to settled on a different format than JUC
(and I realize now, that this is probably due to the relatively costly
format the JUC represent): So the CPH event in September is kind of a
new approach, and perhaps a trial of the new format.
* We use the term "User Event" instead of "User Conference" - Actually
we see the gathering very much as a conference, but we did this
simply to deliberately distinguish it from CloudBees' JUC format.
* We start at noon - so attendees are expected to have their own lunch
before they show up.
* We continue to late in the evening, but the conference meal will be
sandwiches - enough to fill everybody, but not in any way fancy (a
note hereto: The conference meal I had at JUC in Paris was the best
conference meal I had in my entire career ;-)
* When the event officially ends at the conference hotel (19:00'ish),
we have invited the participants to join us to a cafe or pub in the
neighborhood for more relaxed discussions and free drinks - This
social after-event has it's own sponsor (Programming Research in the
CPH event).
* The token attendee give-away will be a mug instead of a T-shirt. The
sponsor value will be the same, but the production cost will be less
than half of what it cost to produce a T-shirt. And then we just
hope, that the attendees will like their mug as much a they would
have liked a T-shirt.
In our case (CPH september) we didn't have a call for paper session -
but that is not necessarily part of the format we are suggesting, it
was simply because we had so many good speakers lined up in our network
(Nokia, Sony Mobile, Programming Research, Grundfos, CloudBees and
Ourselves) that this year with south short notice - we didn't need a CfP
session.
The CPH user event is hosted and funded by Praqma and a generous sponsor
contribution is added from CloudBees (Thanks!!!) and as I mentioned -
the social after-event has it's own sponsor.
...And just to backup Kohsuke in the experiences he's sharing: Even
though we are trying to make this a cheap event (also for the attendees
- signup fee is only 25€) we are *still* going to loose a considerable
amount on money on hosting this event. And on top of that we are going
to spend an equally considerable amount of time on planning and
executing it.
I'm not whining about it! Quite the opposite. We have a commercial
interest in Jenkins and we are happy to be able to 'pay-back' to the
community. But I think that two point are important for large events:
* Any event will need a commercial sponsorship to become a success:
Cheap is good, but moneyless as in 'driven solely be initiative' -
is probably not going to happen outside the CIA format.
* If a commercial sponsor should contribute - they would want the
event to be 'officially accepted and approved' by the community in
order to shine in the light of the Google doctrine: "Do No Evil"
As we in Praqma are developers ourselves we found that we had an urge to
fill in content that was developer oriented (as opposed to user
oriented) as well. But this represents a paradox; it's really difficult
to mix such different groups (users and developers) at the same
conference unless it's a big one with more tracks, so instead we have
decided to host a separate developer event along with the user event (a
full day workshop on the day before the user event).
One of the complaints or critics we often hear from developers who
attended hackatons (including ourselves) is that they are often not very
well organized: People meet with no specific agenda, they spend a day
writing code (often alone) on the same stuff as they would have worked
on had they stayed at home - at the end of the day they eat pizza
together and break up.
We have internally worked on developing a good format for a well
organized hackaton:
It's a "Code Camp".
It's inspired by open space technology/discussions (the term 'camp' is
also used within the open space approach): Developers are encouraged to
bring a few topics or issues to the camp, which starts with a short
introduction where each develop gives a few words of explanation to the
topics. Then there is a vote among the attendees: What are the
interesting topic that should be worked on? The topics that gets the
most votes win a time-slot on the code camp. Then we break out into
small groups - one per topic (no one works alone, all groups are at
least 3 participants).
Following up on the inspiration from the Open Space technology the good
topics are characterized by:
1) a real issue of concern
2) a high level of complexity
3) a high level of diversity
4) a real or potential conflict
5) a high level urgency.
* The camp has it's own wiki - each break out session will have an
appointed scribe, who captures findings, results, deliveries,
discussions etc on the wiki. This supports that the summary-sessions
can be kept very short, anybody who wants to know what the other
groups worked with can find it on the wiki - and so can people who
didn't even attend the camp.
* The camp is well-organized although even though it's not
specifically pre-organized.
The scribes can be recruited among more novice developers, who would
like to attend the Code Camp, but potentially would be intimidated by
the size of the brain trust. Or scribes could be recruited among
once-was-developer managers who tend to have strong opinions on
direction, but due to rusty code-fingers they lack to ability to
actually contribute to the code base (I'm sad to admit, that the
description fits myself ;-).
At Praqma we run Code Camps like this internally among our developers
about every second month and we find them quite efficient - we'd like to
share. It could potentially also be a format for a Jenkins devroom at
FOSDEM?
In order to bring down the cost, the Code Camp is hosted at Praqma Plex
- and we simply serve pizzas from the local joint. It's very cheap!
Seats are limited to 20 developers, together with scribes and
facilitators we'll be around 25 in total. The registration fee is purely
symbolic; 15€, just to make sure that no-shows are encouraged to
unregister as opposed to just not showing up.
Like Kohsuke just announced that CloudBees is prepared to take
responsibility for hosting the San Fransisco JUC once every year. We at
Praqma are also prepared to commit ourselves the make both the "Jenkins
CI Copenhagen Code Camp" and the "Jenkins CI Copenhagen User Event"
annual events.
www.praqma.net/jciusrcph12 <http://www.praqma.net/jciusrcph12>
www.praqma.net/jcicodecamp12 <http://www.praqma.net/jcicodecamp12>
This year it's in September - but like JUC in San Fransisco is
piggybacking on Java ONE we are also considering on having our events
piggyback on a larger one - and we have our eyes set on the GOTO
conference (http://gotocon.com) which would imply that the 2013 event
probably will be in May - not September.
And like Alyssa @ CloudBees we, here at Praqma, also declare ourselves
ready to assist any community driven initiative or CIA event that need
assistance in our region (Europe) with what ever is needed: Wiki
hosting, Money handling, Event registration, CfP, design of stickers,
logos, give-aways etc.
Cheers!
____________________________________________________________
<http://www.praqma.net/>
*Lars Kruse, M.Sc.*
Partner & Co-founder
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
+45 20 87 25 30
Skype:lakruzz *Praqma A/S*
www.praqma.net <http://www.praqma.net/>
Allerød Stationsvej 4
DK-3450 Allerød
+45 36 77 27 62
On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 2:00 AM, Kohsuke Kawaguchi <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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/
