Open Stack

On 10:49 Feb 08, Jay Pipes wrote:
> On 02/08/2016 10:29 AM, Sean Dague wrote:

<snip>

> >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.

Besides having the summit be a completely separated event from the conference
this isn't entirely different from today:

* The "main team that does the marketing event" is not really involved with the
  summit.
 
* The community decides on the sessions.

* Thierry and I (who are at the Foundation *not* focused on the conference) are
  working with the community requests on the design summit side. This includes
  making sure projectors, preferred seating style for sessions are available
  based on the feedback we received from attendees. There's a lot more that
  goes into handling all of this, but I assure you we have a completely
  different focus in the summit attendees needs.

* Every summit ends with a feedback session with the community. Thierry and
  I look back on this for improvements when we're planning the next summit.

The team organizing this is the community.

The Foundation staff that helps on the summit side (Thierry and I who do
actually participate in the summit too) are proxies for the community to handle
additional things that require resources from event staff.

-- 
Mike Perez