This morning there was a conversation in IRC about JUC SF 2012 sponsors
spamming attendees [1] (starting [18:39:23]).
First of all, I'd like to apologize for my oversight on this. I'm taking
this seriously, and people understand that this is an important issue.
To our defense, we did take this seriously --- here is the actual text
that Lisa sent to the sponsors.
As part of your Gold sponsorship, please find the attendee list
attached. Please treat it gently - we don't want the attendees to
feel like the conference opts them in to a barrage of emails.[For
example, send them an email that invites them to opt in or download
an asset, but don't just merge them with your main database.] I think
you'll be especially pleased with the quality/size of companies that
attended!
Lisa is going to write to those sponsors about this once again and let
them know that it's making them all look bad. Hopefully that'll
propagate through the sponsors.
We also need to fix this for future conferences.
I was told that sponsors really are after the contact information and if
we can't use that in the sponsor package, it'll make it very hard to
have any sponsors. As far as I know, sponsors pay the lion's share of
the cost. I've asked to give us the summary of the actual figures so
that we can get the sense of it.
Take JUC Tokyo for example --- it was run really cheap, with the best
volunteer participation among any other JUCs. But it still cost close to
$10K.
So something has to give. Ideally I'm hoping that something like an
opt-out option would be acceptable. Tyler suggested a QR code on a
attendee badge (that scans vCard). We all want to run the conference
cheaply, but in JUC SF historically we don't get that many volunteers to
help, nor we've managed to find any other cheaper venue.
I think JUC is valuable for multiple reasons --- it helps with
publicity, for one thing. It gets slides created that benefit those who
aren't attending. It helps building the community by letting people meet
face to face. So I'd like to keep it going, and for that it needs to be
sustainable for everyone. We need to find the right balance.
I think we need to talk about this. I put this in for the project
meeting agenda item [2] in Nov 14th.
[1] http://echelog.com/logs/browse/jenkins/1351810800
[2] https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Governance+Meeting+Agenda
--
Kohsuke Kawaguchi http://kohsuke.org/
