On Thu, 19 Jan 2012, Sagara Gunathunga wrote:
With few local committers I'm planning to have a Apache community building event in Colombo (Sri Lanka) somewhere around next month. Still I'm not sure whether we could brand this event as a Bar Camp because this event mainly not targeting existing members of Apache projects instead new people ( can be developers, students etc) who have desire on contributing on Apache projects.
That's a completely fine group of people to target with a BarCamp! Most of our BarCamps outside of ApacheCon have been attended by non-committers more than committers.
In terms of branding it as a BarCamp or not, I'd think the key questions are:
* Will you be using the BarCamp format, or something different? * How well known is the BarCamp name+concept amongst your target audience? * And if it's know, will they think of the right thing if named as one?
Speaking in several universities and local groups we found that lot of people like to contribute on Apache projects but they are having problem like How can I start ? What is the best project me to start ? I'm not a developer can I contribute and become a committer ? etc.
If you do give these talks, it'd be great if we could get them recorded. They're very common questions, and I'm sure others would benefit from these. We do have some sound recorders available, which we could get out to you if that'd help.
(I recall chatting with Ross on a few occasions about helping people overcome these very problems. Alas we don't have any concrete plans for how best to solve them, beyond events like this, but there are some vague ideas...)
Basic Objectives of this event as follows. 1.) Motivate people to contribute on Apache projects and answer various doubts they have. 2.) Provide some practical guidelines to start their project contribution. 3.) Make some space for new people to communicate with experienced committers and share lessons they learned. 4.) Conduct a practical session demonstrate concept like Fixing JIRA issues , debugging, patching process etc. ( One of a Apache project will use for this demonstration)
This sounds like something that could be done largely in the BarCamp format. Equally it could be called a "beginners hackathon" or similar
It seems to me that the things you'll be covering will apply to quite a few non Apache projects too, so it might be worth reaching out to any other Open Source communities you know of locally, to see if they want to get involved. For some of the latter parts, more experienced people could allow you to help people in more detail with getting going, in more of a hackathon like way.
At the moment we have an idea about possible sponsors that covers location and refreshment cost. I don't think we can find sponsors to cover transport cost for foreign speakers but if any speaker willing to find sponsors their own we are more then welcome them for this event.
Do you have a feeling for how many people may attend, and how many existing Apache committers may be able to come to talk / mentor?
(Depending on those two, potentially you could apply to ConCom for help with some of the costs, though probably not to the extent of flying you in a whole panel of speakers!)
Nick
