Open Stack

On Thu, 2016-02-25 at 12:40 +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Qiming Teng wrote:
> > [...]
> > Week 1:
> >    Wednesday-Friday: 3 days Summit.
> >      * Primarily an event for marketing, sales, CTOs, architects,
> >        operators, journalists, ...
> >      * Contributors can decide whether they want to attend this.
> >    Saturday-Sunday:
> >      * Social activities: contributors meet-up, hang outs ...
> > 
> > Week 2:
> >    Monday-Wednesday: 3 days Design Summit
> >      * Primarily an event for developers.
> >      * Operators can hold meetups during these days, or join
> > project
> >        design summits.
> > 
> > If you need to attend both events, you don't need two trips.
> > Scheduling
> > both events by the end of a release cycle can help gather more
> > meaningful feedbacks, experiences or lessons from previous releases
> > and
> > ensure a better plan for the coming release.
> > 
> > If you want to attend just the main Summit or only the Design
> > Summit,
> > you can plan your trip accordingly.
> 
> This was an option we considered. The main objection was that we are 
> pretty burnt out and ready to go home when comes Friday on a single
> -week event, so the prospect of doing two consecutive weeks looked a 
> bit like madness (especially considering ancillary events like 
> upstream training, the board meeting etc. which tend to happen on the 
> weekend before summit already). It felt like a good way to reduce our 
> productivity and not make the most of the limited common time 
> together. Furthermore it doesn't solve the issue of suboptimal timing 
> as described in my original email.
> 
> The benefit is that for people attending both events, you indeed save 
> on pure flight costs. But since you have to cover for conference 
> hotel rooms and food over the weekend and otherwise compensate 
> employees for being stuck there over the weekend, the gain is not 
> that significant...

We did actually try to do this for Kernel Summit, Plumbers and Linux
Con in 2012.  Once we tried to schedule it, we got a huge back reaction
from the sponsors, the attendees and the speakers mostly about having
to be away over the weekend.  Eventually we caved to pressure and
overlaid all three events in the same week, which lead to another set
of complaints ...

The lesson I took away from this is never schedule a set of events
longer than a week and I still have the scars to remind me.

James