Open Stack

Excerpts from Jay Pipes's message of 2018-06-04 18:47:22 -0400:
> On 06/04/2018 05:02 PM, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> > The most significant point of interest to the contributor
> > community from this section of the meeting was the apparently
> > overwhelming interest from companies employing contributors, as
> > well as 2/3 of the contributors to recent releases who responded
> > to the survey, to bring the PTG and summit back together as a single
> > event. This had come up at the meeting in Dublin as well, but in
> > the time since then the discussions progressed and it looks much
> > more likely that we will at least try re-combining the two events.
> 
> OK, so will we return to having eleventy billion different mid-cycle 
> events for each project?

Given that the main objections seem to be funding the travel (not the
events themselves), or participants not *wanting* to go to that many
events, I suspect not.

> Personally, I've very much enjoyed the separate PTGs because I've 
> actually been able to get work done at them; something that was much 
> harder when the design summits were part of the overall conference.

Yes, me, too. I find it useful to separate the discussions focused
on internal team planning as opposed to setting priorities for the
community more broadly.  If we recombine the events I hope we can
find a way to retain both types of conversations.

> In fact I haven't gone to the last two summit events because of what I 
> perceive to be a continued trend of the summits being focused on 
> marketing, buzzwords and vendor pitches/sales. An extra spoonful of the 
> "edge", anyone?

I've found the Forums significantly more useful the last 2 times. We
definitely felt your absence in a few sessions.

I don't think I've attended a regular talk at a summit in years.
Maybe if we're going to combine the events again we can get a track
set aside for contributor-focused talks, though. Not onboarding,
or how-to-use-it talks, but deep-dives into how things like the new
placement system was designed or how to build a driver for oslo.config,
or whatever. The sort of thing you would expect to find at a
tech-focused conference with contributors attending.

> > We discussed several reasons, including travel expense, travel visa
> > difficulties, time away from home and family, and sponsorship of
> > the events themselves.
> > 
> > There are a few plans under consideration, and no firm decisions
> > have been made, yet. We discussed a strawman proposal to combine
> > the summit and PTG in April, in Denver, that would look much like
> > our older Summit events (from the Folsom/Grizzly time frame) with
> > a few days of conference and a few days of design summit, with some
> > overlap in the middle of the week.  The dates, overlap, and
> > arrangements will depend on venue availability.
> 
> Has the option of doing a single conference a year been addressed? Seems 
> to me that we (the collective we) could save a lot of money not having 
> to put on multiple giant events per year and instead have one.
>
> Just my two cents, but the OpenStack and Linux foundations seem to be 
> pumping out new "open events" at a pretty regular clip -- OpenStack 
> Summit, OpenDev, Open Networking Summit, OpenStack Days, OpenInfra Days, 
> OpenNFV summit, the list keeps growing... at some point, do we think 
> that the industry as a whole is just going to get event overload?

Thierry addressed this a bit, but I want to emphasize that the cost
savings were less focused on the event itself or foundation costs
and more on the travel expenses for all of the people going to the
event.  So, yes, having fewer events (or focusing more on regional
events) would help with that, some. It's not clear to me how much
of a critical mass of contributors we would get at regional events,
though, unless we planned for it explicitly.

Doug