Apache Committers received an email from Nick Burch, VP Conference Committee on Friday. For those that missed it, Nick provide a good summary of progress aimed at proposed conference concepts for North America (ACNA) and Europe (ACEU)[1]
OpenOffice.org had a great history of annual conferences, all hosted by intrepid volunteers in great locations; e.g. Koper, Barcelona, Lyons, Orvieto, Biudapest to name a few. As an Apache project, we can do Meetups or participate in BarCamps. Both are small and quite local. If we want to think big, we need to think how we can leverage this great ACEU opportunity. For example, do we want to organize a 'conference in a conference'? This would mean putting together a program that would fill a section of the space allocated to ACEU with talks and tutorials specific to our project, but also, I think we would be remiss to not link our content to complementary Apache projects; e.g. Chemistry, POI, ODF Toolkit, etc. Take a look at the venue... the Rhein-Neckar-Arena[2] looks really cool. Read Nick's note and you'll see what I'm getting at,...hopefully. This could be a great way to bring back an 'OpenOffice.org conference' experience now within the Apache Family. Events are hard work, tons of deadlines, lots of details. If we want to do this it will take leadership and volunteerism. Remember we have funding in the SPI account (just have to pry it loose) that could be made available to help make this a reality and give our project real focus and impact. I'm in. Anyone else? [1] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-apachecon-discuss/201205.mbox/browser [2] http://www.achtzehn99.de/wirsol-rhein-neckar-arena/
