Morning folks,

This is a good point, however like Chip mentioned we would need sponsors.

Organizing a 3 day event is a big task, you need to find a location that suits 
people, you need to pay for that location, you need a program, you need 
attendance, you need sponsors etc.

For Amsterdam, Schuberg took the lead role. Citrix was the main financial 
backer with Schuberg. I believe it basically took ~3 people full time from 
Schuberg for several months to organize things the way it was, plus a lot of 
time and energy from other folks to get sponsors, drive attendance etc. The 
event cost ~200k euros and was in the black at the end (no secret there).

For Denver and Budapest we aligned with the ASF and leveraged the Linux 
Foundation to do the logistics and help get sponsors. It worked out but it is 
still a lot of effort to get the program together, help LF reach out to 
sponsors etc. As a side note, even though these were 3 day events, lots of 
folks arrive on tutorial day, spend the keynote day and leave at night or in 
the morning. That's why I pushed for a poster session at the end of Budapest, 
because typically folks leave before and we end up with semi empty sessions in 
the last afternoon.

The bottom line is that it is a question of cost, attendance, who takes the 
lead in planning and what does the event look like. We could organize three day 
events much cheaply. Something that comes to mind is configuration management 
camp in Ghent. It drives 400 people, is hosted at the university. There is 
almost no sponsors/booth, no signage, no video recording, very little lunch 
etc. But if we want something like Denver or Budapest, we are looking at 6 
figures plus the human investment.

CloudStack is a brand owned by this community, so anyone here is free and 
should feel entitled to organize its own CloudStack Day close to home. Norway, 
India etc. It could be a 30 people event or it could grow into its own 300/500 
people event. The Japanese community for example organizes CloudStack Japan on 
their own and drives 500 people.

Now all these 1 day events are co-located (before, after or during) the 
linuxcon events (cloud open, KVM forum, Xen summit, Kernel summit etc). So I am 
sure you can justify going for 3 days, attend the other LF events and attend 
the CloudStack day. I do think there is better alignment with LF events than 
with other ASF projects. Sadly the Apachecon itself is not a large conference, 
and I don't think we got the cross-pollination we were hoping. LF events are 
much bigger (Dusseldorf in the fall was 1,500 people).

The risk I do see with 1 day event is that we get fragmented and that we don't 
see each other that often.

To conclude, it is key that everyone on our lists feels entitled to do things 
and take the lead. In some sense there is no such thing as us vs. "the 
organizers". We are all the organizers of these conferences. It is a matter of 
who has the time and the will to step up and lead these events (1 or 3 days ) 
and who will attend.

-If you have the time, can you take the lead and organize another 1 day event 
closer to home ?
-If you have time, can you take the lead on one of those scheduled events and 
take on the program planning ?
-If you have funds, can you sponsor the event ?
-if you have space, can you donate it for an event ?


-sebastien


On Mar 5, 2015, at 2:01 AM, Erik Weber <terbol...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 3:45 AM, ilya musayev <ilya.mailing.li...@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> Am i right in assuming that we no longer going to have 3 day long conferences 
> and instead 5 separate cloudstack day events? It does makes sense as it helps 
> with awareness, but..
> 
> Looking at it from my employers side, as well as my personally - its a bit 
> hard to justify a trip for just one day :( On average, a person would have to 
> travel a night before and leave a day later to make the most of it. That is 2 
> days spent in transit to attend 1 day event.
> 
> Lets see how this works out, but i really think we need at least 1 event that 
> is longer than a day - so we can have a community get together that many 
> would be able to attend.
> 
> I must agree.
> 
> Unless you live near one of the airline hubs you'll most likely have to 
> travel three days anyway.
> In my case I have to travel the night before to get there before 1PM, and as 
> anyone would want to attend the night events (that's usually where I 
> personally get most out of the conference) I have stay a night longer.
> 
> Justifying a three day trip to attend a one day event is significantly harder 
> than justifying a four day (we usually arrive a bit later on the first day) 
> trip to attend a three day event.
> 
> -- 
> Erik

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