Rich can try to take full responsibility, but there was consultation with all appropriate places.
Sent from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Rich Bowen<mailto:rbo...@rcbowen.com> Sent: 7/1/2015 5:48 AM To: dev@community.apache.org<mailto:dev@community.apache.org> Subject: Re: ApacheCON CORE? ApacheCon! 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
