Open Stack

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 3:29 AM, Tom Fifield <tom at openstack.org> wrote:
> Team,
>
> It's great to see so much passion! :)
>
> Here's an attempt at a summary email. I'll wait until a later email to
> wade into the discussion myself ;) Feel free to jump in on any point.
>
> =Things we tend to agree on=

<snip> I agree on all those too.

> =Things still under discussion=
> Sell Tickets
> * Many people agreed that some moderate form of ticketing could be OK,
> but the question remains to what extent this should be priced ("low
> fee"? $100-200? "cover costs"?). A strong counterpoint was that paid
> ticketing makes it less accessible (see "spirit"), prevents some local
> attendance, and is unfair to smaller operators, though others noted that
> it may be the only practical way to raise funds in the future.

I think everyone agrees this is best kept as low a barrier as possible.

It would be interesting to know per attendee costs to help assess what
kind of barrier it would be.  Obviously if we get some corporate
underwriting that meets the 'we all agree'  low impact desires that
would help minimize this and if it can be zero it should be.

> Break into Regional Events
> * A number of viewpoints, ranging from "multiple regional events" to
> "one event only [maybe with a travel fund]" to "one event that moves
> around [maybe even outside USA]" to "make it in the centre of USA for
> easier travel on average".

I think breaking into regional events would seriously undermine the
utility of the event unless someone has a really clever idea how to
run 3 or 4 locations as a single distributed event so we can actually
gather and share ideas among all of them (I don't see how that would
work).

I am uncomfortable with the US-centric nature of the ops events even
though it's been terribly convenient for me.  I would suggest if we so
start rotating continents (which I'm in favor of) we try and keep it
opposite the summit locations so those least likely to make the summit
are most likely to make the mid cycle that way no region gets left too
far behind.

>
> Capping Numbers (inc. Limit Attendees per Company)
> * A lot of disagreement here. Many argued that any kind of cap or
> barrier to entry detracts from the accessibility of the event. Others
> put forth that too few restrictions could dilute the ops-heavy attendee
> base, and implied that large companies might send too many people.

I think it's best to try addressing this socially at first.  Make it
clear space is at a premium and encourage attendees to send the
minimum number of people necessary to cover the sessions.

Setting a hard limit is hard because I can imagine larger and more
complex sites may have a legitimate need to send more people due to
greater role specialization or other reasons.

>
> Multiple Tracks
> * To help deal with room size, we could split into multiple tracks. The
> ideal number of tracks is not clear at this stage.

I'm not even sure what I think is best here, but these are my thoughts:

More tracks makes it harder for small to medium size sites to cover.
Not saying we shouldn't expand parallelism but we should be cautious.

My site is a private university cloud with order of 100 hypervisors,
we're more or less happy to send 2 people to summits and one to mid
cycles, at least that's what I've gotten them to pay for in the past.
Obviously we don't come close to covering summits.  The dual track
(for one attendee) in PHL was OK and conflicts weren't too bad.

The obvious alternative if we need more sessions would be to go longer
and honestly I'm not keen on that either and would probably prefer
wider over longer.


-Jon