Open Stack

Hi Tom, thanks for bringing up the subject. Like many commenters I share
some of the same views.

I'm very "+1" on preventing vendor booth space from happening. This isn't
an event to sell a product, booth space would be wasted on both the
attendees and the booth staff.

I feel that multiple corporate underwriters for the event would not only be
welcome, but encouraged. We're all working together even while competing to
make OpenStack awesome, there should be no barrier to multiple entities
sharing the burden of funding (parts) of the event.

I think a modest attendee fee would be acceptable as well, given the
sponsorship capability demonstrated by Foundation at previous events. These
meetups are invaluable to us the attendees and to the organizations that
choose to foot the bill for flights and hotels, because the return on that
investment is quite high. Adding on an attendee fee wouldn't really make a
huge difference in the total cost, but it would help out the event.

As far as regional, that's a hard one. I wouldn't necessarily want to split
the meeting into multiple of them. I'd rather see pooling of funds for
travel assistance to get those who are not geographically close to the
event in. I'd definitely be in favor of moving the event around, more than
just North America. These meetups are worth the cost of travel.

I do like the session layout, but I'd like to see a couple more things. I'd
like to see a lightening talk session. Much like the ops show and tell, or
maybe even just expand ops show and tell to also include lightening
sessions. Not a full session like at Summit, but just 10~ minutes to talk
about an interesting topic or challenge or project. We can fit a lot more
speakers in and drive up the "inclusion" factor without taking up a huge
amount of time or having the problem of 20 things happening at once. The
next thing I'd like to see is some video recording support, for those that
really can't make it but would love to see the sessions after the fact.
Here, starting small and growing is totally awesome too, no need to shoot
for 100% coverage the first time.

Thanks again for bringing the topic up to the community!


- jlk

On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 9:33 PM, Tom Fifield <tom at openstack.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Right now, behind-the-scenes, we're working on getting a venue for next
> ops mid-cycle. It's taking a little longer than normal, but rest assured
> it is happening.
>
> Why is it so difficult? As you may have noticed, we're reaching the size
> of event where both physically and financially, only the largest
> organisations can host us.
>
> We thought we might get away with organising this one old-school with a
> single host and sponsor. Then, for the next, start a brainstorming
> discussion with you about how we scale these events into the future -
> since once we get up and beyond a few hundred people, we're looking at
> having to hire a venue as well as make some changes to the format of the
> event.
>
> However, it seems that even this might be too late. We already had a
> company that proposed to host the meetup at a west coast US hotel
> instead of their place, and wanted to scope out other companies to
> sponsor food.
>
> This would be a change in the model, so let's commence the discussion of
> how we want to scale this event :)
>
> So far I've heard things like:
> * "my $CORPORATE_BENEFACTOR would be fine to share sponsorship with others"
> * "I really don't want to get to the point where we want booths at the
> ops meetup"
>
> Which are promising! It seems like we have a shared understanding of
> what to take this forward with.
>
> So, as the ops meetup grows - what would it look like for you?
>
> How do you think we can manage the venue selection and financial side of
> things? What about the session layout and the scheduling with the
> growing numbers of attendees?
>
> Current data can be found at
> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Operations/Meetups#Venue_Selection .
>
> I would also be interested in your thoughts about how these events have
> only been in a limited geographical area so far, and how we can address
> that issue.
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
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