On 20 September 2011 15:22, Nick Burch <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi All > > As mentioned, SAP have kindly agreed to sponsor the use of their internal > conference facilities to allow us to host an ApacheCon there. This should > allow us to run a more community style of event. Because we wouldn't be > based at an expensive hotel, and because SAP would be covering the facility > costs, we should be able to run something with a lower headline conference > fee, and a lower attendence cost. > > There are some smaller things and some bigger things we need to consider. > First up, when would we want to hold the event? Largely influencing this: > What's the soonest we could be ready? (We will be constrained by when the > SAP conference venue we prefer is available) > > Related to this, which of the two SAP sites would we prefer? Hopefully Paul > Gotez can let everyone know the details of the two possible sites. (Paul is > an Apache committer who works at SAP and who's been doing amazing work > getting the SAP approval) > > I may have missed this, but where are these two SAP sites? > > Moving onto the bigger part, what sort of conference do we want to put on > in the space? Monday-Friday? Wednesday-Sunday? > Monady-Sunday/Saturday-Friday? How much should be conference sessions, how > much hackathons, how much meetups, how much barcamp / ad-hoc sessions? How > many people will we expect to come for all, and how many for just one day? > Ratio of talks aimed at users, developers, and those interested in open > source business/community/the apache way? > > When we had the retreat in knockee I know a few of my colleagues were unable to make it because it was a weekend. It doesn't bother me too much, but I would suggest something Monday-Friday (or a subset of days) would be better. > Feeding into this, I know quite a few people go to other community open > source events, and a smaller number help organise them. What works well? > What doesn't work? Who should we be learning from and emulating? > > We also need to think about speakers, and generally about how to help get > enough members / committers / nearly-committers along to share knowledge and > teach the apache way. At the big hotel events, speakers have tended to get a > conference pass, hotel nights, and some flight help if needed. People > sharing knowledge in other ways just get cheaper conference passes, but > still need to pay lots for hotel rooms. With an event like this, the > conference fee should be much lower, and with no hotel attached people can > stay nearby wherever their budget permits. How much help do we need to offer > for speakers? And can that work with a lower registration fee, and hence > lower total budget? > > And anything else I've missed that we'd need to consider? :) > > Cheers > Nick > -- Alasdair Nottingham [email protected]
