On 07/01/2015 07:31 AM, Pierre Smits wrote:
Who, in his moment of brightness, dreamed up the notion that a perfectly
accepted household name (and thereby a de facto brand) as ApacheCon for the
main event of the ASF would benefit from adding an extension like CORE?
That would be me, Ross Gardler (President), and Angela Brown, our
conference producer. And as the lead of ApacheCon at the ASF, of course
I take full personal responsibility for this decision. It's the right
decision, and I have the full enthusiastic support of the board of
directors in this decision.
ApacheCon in itself doesn't eat into the impact of the joint event 'Apache
Big Data', as that name doesn't have Con attached to Apache in all
promotions done up to now... Or dilutes the branding impact of that event.
I disagree (obviously).
Is there a negative connotation with the name that it would benefit from
the CORE extension?
No. Nothing negative. It's an expansion of the brand.
We have been talking about this for literally 10 years, as we watched
ApacheCon get too large. Or, rather, the topic area get too large, and
ApacheCon suffer as a result. As you have seen in every event that
you've been involved with, we have more *PROJECTS* than conference
slots. So you have to decide which projects to ignore, and which
projects to unfairly overrepresent.
For example, at the last few events, OFBiz has had an entire track, and
other projects have complained bitterly to me, because they had no talks
at all. I took that criticism because it seems obvious to me that
tracks, rather than individual talks, were the only way to actually get
attendees.
TEN years ago, we talked with our conference producer about having
multiple events, including ApacheCon Big Data, ApacheCon Search,
ApacheCon Java, ApacheCon HTTP, and ApacheCon Core for things that were
homeless, including the overarching community and business kinds of
talks. (I believe the conversation was actually in Las Vegas, which
would put it in 2003 or 2004?)
In this way, we dreamed, we could provide a home for all of our
projects, with everyone represented, and still have a community-building
event.
Ironically, at the time, the producer was absolutely thrilled about this
approach, and the peanut gallery killed the concept due to their concern
that it would dilute the branding impact, as you put it.
So, here we are, the most important Open Source entity on the planet, by
any measure you want to choose, and we still have a conference that only
450 people are attending. Why? Because as a manager I'm absolutely going
to send my employee to MesosCon, where they get 2 days of content,
rather than ApacheCon, where they get one or two talks. No question in
my mind.
We firmly believe that the solution is more targeted events. This is the
first of those. But we don't want to lose the main ApacheCon concept.
Thus, two co-located events. We will be doing this again in Vancouver.
And we'll be doing it again in Europe next year. This is the new reality.
If you'd like to be more involved in this process and form the event in
coming years, this is of course the place to have the conversation. But,
given our *LONG* history of mismanaging our producer relationship, the
board has delegated this event to me, and I have contracted with LF to
handle the details because they are *awesome* at building event brands.
One of these days, I need to write a history of ConCom, so that more
people can understand why the board made this decision.
--
Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com - @rbowen
http://apachecon.com/ - @apachecon
