Hi,
+1 for the name, ASFCon seems to well fit as we want to rebrand Apache
to ASF so it make sense to have ASFCon instead of ApacheCon. People will
not be lost.
For the positioning, I think that having a mix with how an opensource
community is working and some technical talks related to ASF projects
can be a good fit.
regards,
François
On 10/06/2024 13:20, Claude Warren wrote:
I originally posted the content of this note in two different slack
conversations. I have decided to combine them and place them on the
mailing list for wider distribution.
I believe that there are two issues that are retarding the acceptance of
ASF produced conferences
- The name
- The positioning
The name is an issue. You tell a potential sponsor or attendee or other
interested party that you are working on a "Community over Code" conference
and there is a blank look. You have to tell them it is the ASF conference
that replaces ApacheCon. Then they may be interested, but often you will
hear something like "I'm looking for technical conferences, not community
building". If you then follow up with: "This is the technical ASF
conference", perhaps they will come. But you have already had to clear
two hurdles. How many potential sponsors or attendees didn't ask questions
at the first hurdle and decided Community over Code was not for them? How
many left at the second hurdle because they thought it was a community
building focused conference. (Some will argue that all conferences are
community building). So before you get a chance to tell them what a great
conference it will be, an unknown number of people and organizations have
turned away. I don't know how to measure that loss but I suspect that it
is large. Renaming the conference to "The ASFConference" or "ASFCon" would
go a long way to mitigating this problem.
The positioning is an issue.
There are lots of conferences that talk about specific ASF projects and the
"best" ways to configure and run the tools -- These are end user focused
conferences and often come with names that include the word "Summit", or
for smaller conferences "Meetup".
There are a fair number of conferences that discuss software development at
the "gnats eyeball level" (e.g. https://algo-conference.org/2024/)
There are very few conferences that discuss medium level developments that
may be applicable across projects.
I found that ApacheCon (I have not attended a C/C NA) felt like a
collection of siloed conferences. If there were 15 tracks it could just as
easily have been 15 meetups. It felt to me that there was very little
cross pollination.
I feel that if the ASF Conference is to retain its relevance it needs to
focus on being a developer first conference that emphasizes application
blocks that can be used across projects. To do this would require an
approach that is orthogonal to the way we have always done it. To whit no
more project specific topics but topics that are of interest to multiple
projects: not groovy, or cassandra, or kafka; but JVM language scripting,
cluster consensus strategies, and streaming data strategies.
Become the conference that developers want to attend because they are going
to learn something that will be applicable across the projects and products
they work on. Be the conference that employers will send employees to
because those employees return as better developers.
Note: I speak of developers but I include all contributor categories like
documentation specialists, testing specialists, graphic designers, etc, in
that category. Basically anybody that contributes to the development of a
project.
In terms of funding, I think there are lessons to be learned from Sci-Fi
and comics and other fandom based conferences. You don't have to charge a
lot at the door. For example MileHiCon a large literary science fiction
conference in Denver is currently charging $54 for ages 12 and up, free for
11 and under for all three days. You don't have to have large scale
sponsors. When I worked on MileHiCon the funding came from selling
"vendor tables". Currently those go for $125 - $375 (see
https://milehicon.org/perennial-fixtures/vendors-room/). If the ASF can
produce a conference that small scale vendors want to attend, the vendor
space will sell out.
The ASF conference should become the place where developers want to go to
learn stuff, where employers want to send employees because they will
return with new ideas and better approaches to problems, and where vendors
of tools for developers want to be. I think it is possible, but not if the
conference continues to compete with large scale siloed "Summit"
conferences.
Claude
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
