Open Stack

Excerpts from Brian Curtin's message of 2016-02-08 09:09:37 -0500:
> On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would love to see the OpenStack contributor community take back the design
> > summit to its original format and purpose and decouple it from the OpenStack
> > Summit's conference portion.
> >
> > I believe the design summits should be organized by the OpenStack
> > contributor community, not the OpenStack Foundation and its marketing and
> > event planning staff.
> 
> As someone who spent years organizing PyCon as a volunteer from the
> Python community, with four of those years in a row taking about 8
> solid months of pre-conference effort, not to mention the on-site
> effort to run a volunteer conference of that size [0]...I would
> suggest even longer and harder thought before stretching a community
> like this even more thinly. Things should change, but probably not the
> "who's doing the work" aspect.

I wholeheartedly agree. Figuring out who is going to talk about
what is the _least_ difficult and time consuming part of organizing
a large event like we would need, even if it's just the contributor
community*.  If you think you can plan such an event, maintain your
day job and sanity, and then focus on participating while you're
at the event, you're wrong. If you want proof, I encourage you to
get involved with an existing community-run conference. Even one
of the small local events will give you a real education in just
how much work it is. It has certainly given me a healthy respect
for the amazing work the foundation event staff has been doing.

Doug

* Whatever the new event becomes, it should not have the word
  "developer" in the title. We have a lot of contributors who are
  not "developers".

> 
> [0] PyCon is around 2500 (though with one paid staffer now), so maybe
> larger than the target for the event you're thinking of, but it was
> still a massive effort at the crowds of 2000, 1500, 1000, etc. and
> being fully community driven.
>