Open Stack

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 04:14:06PM +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> TL;DR: Let's split the events, starting after Barcelona.

Yes, please. Your proposal addresses the big issue I have with current
summits which is the really poor timing wrt start of each dev cycle.

> The idea would be to split the events. The first event would be for upstream
> technical contributors to OpenStack. It would be held in a simpler,
> scaled-back setting that would let all OpenStack project teams meet in
> separate rooms, but in a co-located event that would make it easy to have
> ad-hoc cross-project discussions. It would happen closer to the centers of
> mass of contributors, in less-expensive locations.

The idea that we can choose less expensive locations is great, but I'm a
little wary of focusing too much on "centers of mass of contributors", as
it can easily become an excuse to have it in roughly the same places each
time. As a non-USA based contributor, I really value the fact the the
summits rotate around different regions instead of spending all the time
in the USA as was the case earlier in openstcck days. Minimizing travel
costs is no doubt a welcome aim for companies' budgets, but it should not
be allowed to dominate to such a large extent that we miss representation
of different regions. ie if we never went back to Asia because the it is
cheaper for the /current/ majority of contributors to go to the US, we'll
make it harder to attract new contributors from those regions we avoid on
cost ground. The "center of mass of contributors" could become a self-
fullfilling prophecy.

IOW, I'm onboard with choosing less expensive locations, but would like
to see us still make the effort to reach out across different regions
for the events, and not become too US focused once again.

> The split should ideally reduce the needs to organize separate in-person
> mid-cycle events. If some are still needed, the main conference venue and
> time could easily be used to provide space for such midcycle events (given
> that it would end up happening in the middle of the cycle).

The obvious risk with suggesting that current mid-cycle events could take
place alongside the business conference, is that the "business conference"
ends up being just as large as our combined conference is today. IOW we
risk actually creating 4 big official developer events a year, instead of
the current 2 events + small unofficial mid-cycles. You'd need to find some
way to limit the scope of any "mid cycle" events that co-located with the
business conference to prevent it growing out of hand.  We really want to
make sure we keep the mid-cycles portrayed as optional small scale
"hackathons", and not something that contributors feel obligated to
attend. IMHO they're already risking getting out of hand - it is hard to
feel well connected to development plans if you miss the mid-cycle events.

Regards,
Daniel
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