Open Stack

On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 11:19 AM, Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 02/08/2016 10:29 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
>
>> On 02/08/2016 10:07 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
>>
>>> Brian Curtin wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Beyond stretching out the community, we would end up with the same
>>> problem we are trying to solve. Most of the cross-project folks that
>>> would end up organizing the event would be too busy organizing the event
>>> to be able to fully participate in it.
>>>
>>
>> Right, this is a super key point. Even just organizing and running local
>> user groups, I know how much time is spent making sure the whole thing
>> seems effortless to attendees, and they can just focus on content.
>>
>> Even look at the recently run Nova midcycle, with 40ish folks, it still
>> required some substantial logistics to pull off. The HPE team did a
>> great job with that. But it definitely required real time and effort.
>>
>
> Agreed.
>
> The Foundation has done an amazing job of making everyone think this is
>> easy (I know how much it is not). Without their efforts organizing these
>> events, eliminating the distractions of wandering in a strange city to
>> find lunch, having a network, projectors, access to facilities,
>> appropriate sized spaces, double checking all those things will really
>> actually be there, chasing after folks when they are not, handling the
>> myriad of other unforseen issues that you never have to see.... we would
>> not be nearly as productive at the design summits.
>>
>
> I understand this. I ran the MySQL Users Conference and Expo for 2 years.
> I realize the amount of effort it takes to organize a 2500+ person event.
> It's essentially a full-time job.
>
> I suppose I should have used a different wording. What I really think
> should happen is that a *separate* team should handle organizing the
> developer-focused working events than the main team that does the marketing
> event. I recognize that it's a lot of work and that asking the "community"
> to just handle the working event organization will lead to undue burden on
> certain cross-project folks.
>
> However, here are a couple things that do *not* need to be done by a
> separate team that handles working event organization:
>
> 1) Vendor and sponsorship stuff
> 2) A call for speakers and reviewing thousands of submissions (this is
> self-organized by each project's contributor team for the working events)
> 3) Determining keynote slots and wrangling C-level speakers -- or any
> speaker wrangling at all
> 4) "Check-in" and registration stands
> 5) Dealing with schwag, giveaways, parties, and other superfluous stuff
>
> So, yes, while it's a lot of work, it's not the same kind of work as the
> marketing event staff.
>
> So while I agree it's worth considering whether the Mega Conference and
>> Design Summit should continue to be collocated and on the same time
>> table, I think the idea that the Design Summit, at even only 500
>> attendees, could/should be run without the Foundation is just folly
>> based on a lack of understanding for what it takes to do events at that
>> scale.
>>
>
> For the record, I *do* understand what it takes to do events at that scale.
>
> > And massively underestimates the effort and skill the Foundation
>
>> has at making our events run as smoothly as they do.
>>
>
> I wasn't saying anything about the effort and skill the Foundation expends
> on making the marketing events run smoothly.
>
> I am pushing for a return to *working* events for developers.
>
> -jay
>
>
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Reworded like that , with no additional burden on the engineers, and
without taking off the fan part of it, it makes a lots of sense.

So are you proposing to do an engineering hardcore Design only summit, less
expensive, like it was in the old days, something like the Usenix or the
Hacking Gathering? Yeah, I miss a lots that and I like it.

++
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