Open Stack

Hi everyone,

Summarizing the thread so far... The proposal was generally 
well-received, with negative feedback concentrated along the following 
themes:

1. "Two trips instead of one"

There is a section of attendees which benefited from a single event: 
in-between people who do not generally go to any midcycle events and 
successfully split their attention between the design summit and the 
main conference when they were overlapping. Those people fear that in 
order to keep the same benefits they will have to travel to two events 
per cycle instead of one.

2. Community split

There is fear that the contributor-specific event will separate the 
community into two groups, with developers skipping the main event and 
non-developers not providing any feedback to the contributor-specific event.

3. Losing the main summit as an excuse to fund devs travel

Some developers are sent to the Design Summit only because the main 
summit is happening at the same time and wouldn't get funding to attend 
a specific event.

4. The fear of US-centricity

A lot of people translated "closer to the centers of mass of 
contributors" as meaning "happening in the US all the time". That would 
indeed reduce the total travel costs, but at the expense of making it a 
lot more costly for non-US parts of our community to participate.

5. The loss of the midcycle spirit

Last but not least, some people really like the midcycles as they stand: 
separated small events where only your small team is around. The split 
appears to reduce the likelihood, the need, or the funding for such 
events. Even if we keep the midcycle laid-back format in the new event, 
co-locating them would turn it into a large event and we'd lose some of 
the focus or some of the "only us around" aspect.

I'll answer those concerns in a reply email.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)