On Wed, 9 May 2012, Ross Gardler wrote:
All I meant was that the ASF does not fund conferences. Nor does it
organise them. There is an infrastructure in place to support people
organising events. But the funding and the main organising effort must
come from the projects themselves.
To give you all a bit more info on this (mental note - put something
like this up on http://events.apache.org/ when we migrate the rest
over)...
At the moment, there are three broad ways that an Apache Project can have
an event. All of these are overseen by ConCom (the Conferences Committee).
The first way is for a project to put on the event itself (or maybe with a
few related projects). This has typically been for hackathons, meetups and
small one day things, but other formats are certainly possible. For this,
the project needs to do the bulk of the work itself, in terms of
organising and getting volunteers. The event will need approval from
ConCom, which will require you to put together a proposal. It may also be
possible for the ASF to underwrite part of the event, or contribute to
some of the cost. If you want either of these, then your proposal will
need to be a lot more detailed. ConCom can provide advice and mentors, but
you'll need to the organising yourselves. (Sadly we have no magic
conference organising pixies)
Draft information on this process is available at
<http://wiki.apache.org/concom-planning/EventInABox>, and will be
finalised and moved to <http://events.apache.org/> after a docs hackathon
(to be arranged). The small-events-discuss list
<http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-small-events-discuss/> is
the place to ask for initial advice on this route. We've not done any
very large events under this program, yet, but it may be an option for the
right project(s) with the right proposal.
Next up, as an option, is to have a third party organised event. With
this, the ASF has no financial risk, and doesn't contribute to the cost.
Typically, events under this model are organised and financed by one or
two companies that are active in (and making money from!) the project /
projects. We have a set of requirements before we agree to let the Apache
brand be used (around neutrality, community agreement to the event, brand
attribution etc). ConCom doesn't provide help or support to the event, but
people from the project(s) are involved.
Finally, you can take advantage of an event that is already being
organised (either by ConCom, or another project), and co-locate something
for your project there. You will need to provide volunteers to put on your
part of the event, and ideally help out with the parent event somewhat
too. This option is probably the least work for any given project, which
is probably why it has been popular in the past, especially with project /
project area tracks at past ApacheCons.
The downsides are that you can only do things that fit in the dates and
space of the parent event, and you'll need to convince the event's
organisers to give you the space. One way to help with the latter bit is
to get involved in the organising :)
This is the option that's on offer with the ApacheCon Europe. You'd need
to make a pitch for the space(s) you'd want, along with the volunteers to
make it happen. Assuming your proposal is strong enough that you get the
space (we don't have enough space for every project in the ASF to have
their own multi-day tracks, so we do have to pick the best proposals!),
you'll then get to run your part. How much you integrate it into the rest
of the conference is largely up to you, in the past we've certainly had
everything from "Track C - Big Data", through "The ApacheCon <project
name> Track" to "<project name>Con (at ApacheCon)".
Hope that helps explain things a bit? If you want to get involved more,
then the two main public lists are:
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-small-events-discuss/
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-apachecon-discuss/
Depending on the kind of event you're thinking of. Several of your mentors
(especially Ross) know lots about events at Apache, so can hopefully help
you too.
Nick
