2009/10/22 Jeffery Painter <pain...@kiasoft.com>: > > Well, the conference is during a week while most of us are in class. That > may be one of the major factors influencing the lack of academic > registrations.
That counts for students and some lecturers, I agree. I wouldn't expect students to attend at cost anyway. I'm hoping we will get students/lecturers to BarCamp and MeetUps. However, there are a great many staff in universities who do not have anything to do with teaching - like me for example. Ross > > -- > Jeffery Painter > > >> There has, to date, not been a single use of the academic discount >> code for ApacheCon. If you care about this then come to our BarCamp >> session on community outreach at ApacheCon - >> http://barcamp.org/BarCampApache >> >> On the one hand the lack of academic registrations surprises me - >> there are many unis in the area and they claim to understand the >> importance of open source - they certainly use it a great deal. On the >> other hand it doesn't surprise me for the following reasons: >> >> a) it is massively expensive for academics (lets hope we get some >> academic folk to the freebies, but don't hold your breath) >> >> b) the academic sector does not understand open source - to the extent >> that major projects are usually funded under a hybrid model they call >> "community source" [1] and [2] >> >> c) there is almost no content of interest to the the average academic >> developer - they use Apache software but because of (b) they don't >> realise they can participate. >> >> Point a) is a difficult one to deal with in isolation since we want >> the prices to come down for everyone and the event has to be paid for >> somehow. >> >> Point b) requires a significant amount of outreach from the ASF. There >> is a huge amount of FUD in the sector, most of it born of a lack of >> understanding rather than malice (although a big-corp director >> recently accused my team of being biased towards the GPL in my >> ***non-advocacy*** day job advisory role. Quite amusing since my team, >> understandably, tell me I'm biased towards permissive licences and >> that is showing in our work). >> >> For point c) what we need is activities focussed on awareness of the >> way we do things. If we want people to understand how things work >> around here, we simply cannot expect people to read through our dodgy >> documentation and then jump into a mailing list full of confidence. >> Apache is a very scary place for newcomers, people on this list will >> not recognise that - we're already here and we've got over that >> hurdle. >> >> Take a look at an independent report from one of my recent day job >> events in this context - it happened that 2/3 projects speakers >> represented ASF projects but it was not an ASF event [2]. I intend to >> be doing a session on this at the BarCamp, so please come along and >> help figure out what we can do and, more importantly, what you can do >> to help. >> >> I feel pretty sure that some people will say "we don't need to do >> outreach" - that's fine, some of us think we do need to, so rather >> than standing in our way in this thread I politely request that you >> step aside and let us get on with it - it's not going to *hurt* your >> project (if I'm wrong in this then of course I would like to hear >> those thoughts). >> >> So see you at the BarCamp... >> >> Ross >> >> [1] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/communityvsopen.xml >> [2] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/communitysource.xml >> [3] >> http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2009/10/17/event-report-oss-watch-workshop-engaging-developers-with-open-source-projects/ >> -- >> Ross Gardler >> >> OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research >> http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org >> For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org >> >> > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org > > -- Ross Gardler OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org