Open Stack

I concur that early scheduling of venues helps companies budget and plan.
Very much appreciate David mentioning that a few years back  he was the person in the back, not in the top five.

I have been fortunate to attend the last two summits, both being on the West Coast, USA. And in that spirit of being
fortunate, am glad the next one is f-aaa-r east, making it hopefully affordable for our hard working colleagues
in China, Korea, Japan, India etc to attend ... enabling a more diverse set of future contributors.

May be we could have a chat room line open to take questions from remote attendees during design sessions.
Recently some Rackspace colleagues introduced me to TeamSpeak, the client is available for pcs, android etc.
That would be used for 2-way communication in addition to an etherpad/slide deck online.
A connection per parallel session?


Regards
Malini


-----Original Message-----
From: David Kranz [mailto:david.kranz at qrclab.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 8:01 PM
To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] How to guarantee success of the I Design Summit in HK

On 5/15/2013 5:57 PM, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> On 05/15/2013 02:21 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
>> We already know some people won't be able to join us, but in the same 
>> way we already knew some people would not be able to join us for all 
>> the previous summits held in the US. For example traveling to US west 
>> coast has always been an issue for some Europeans. This sudden 
>> concern about summits happening far away sounds very... US-centric to 
>> me.
>
> My intention is to make sure that the next Design Summit is successful.
> Remote participation in Portland was dismissed rapidly and consensus 
> was reached with a 'don't bother' verdict.  This time I've noticed 
> people being more 'nervous' and I want to make sure we're on the same 
> page before making a decision that need not to be improvised.
>
>> I'd definitely like to make sure we'll have enough of the "critical"
>> set of people present, which is a bit difficult to evaluate (what 
>> makes you "critical" ?). In most sessions, the discussion happens 
>> between ~5 critical participants, with the rest of the attendance 
>> mostly listening or maybe asking a question. If we can have those 5 
>> critical participants present, I think the summit will work as 
>> intended.
>
> ACK
>
> Anybody has different opinions on this? Tech leads and 'core' 
> developers especially if you disagree, please share your thoughts.
>
I disagree. Although I am one of the ~5 now, I was not at my first summit in Boston. But being in the back was an extremely valuable experience.
Some of the "critical" participants a year or two from now may be sitting in the back this time, but we don't now which ones. If many people who are interested cannot come it will be a bad thing. Perhaps unavoidable, but still not good.

This is a really hard problem. The extra cost is about US$1000 I think for those in the US.  I find it hard to believe that a company employing some one to be a major upstream contributor will make a can't-go decision based on that $1000. 
But this
is a big issue for companies sending dozens or hundreds of people. It would help if the location decisions were made far enough ahead so that the funds could be put in annual budgets. That will likely be a big issue this time around for those whose budgets for October were made last year.

  -David

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