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Dates and venues are being narrowed down for Community Over Code NA 2025. No decision has been made on Community Over Code EU for 2025. While there is much desire among members to do an event in the EU (along with an NA event), there is the very real problem of not having local representatives to handle bookings and contracts in the local language. Without local EU help, or a third-party event organizer, pulling off two events a year will be very challenging. It may be better in the long run to alternate between continents moving forward. Sponsorship After coordination with VP, Fundraising and VP, Sponsor Relations, in 2025 all three teams are going to launch a pilot program to optionally bundle event sponsorship for the 2025 NA conference into ASF Platinum and Gold sponsorships. If successful, this will provide additional value to our corporate sponsors, and bring in more funding and potentially more attendees to our Community Over Code events.
Community Over Code NA concluded on October 10, with generally positive feedback. Conference-level swag was not able to be delivered, due to an unprecedented mix-up with the shipping service. In all, 251 attendees walked in the door, with the following breakdown: 121 speakers (48.32%) 86 general attendees (34.30%) 29 Committers (11.4%) 12 TAC (4.78%) 3 staff (1.2%) A more detailed financial report of the event will be delivered in November, as expenses and sponsorship money are still coming in. The CISA tabletop exercise run by Aeva Black from the CISA was attended by 30 people, who walked through a very true-to-life scenario and how the ASF would and should respond. Conferences will be be conducting a survey of the participants to give feedback to the CISA, and M&P will be working on a joint public post about what was learned by ASF participants in this exercise. We hosted a very well-received event reception at Meow Wolf Denver on the first night of the conference. A speaker/sponsor reception was held on Tuesday night, and Lightning Talks on Thursday. A survey has been shared with all attendees to help inform the planners on what events and locations we will be doing in 2025. I would like to publicly thank the following for all of their assistance with this event, before and during: * Rich Bowen, Director * Nick Burch, TAC Coordinator * Drew Foulks, ASFInfra * Gavin McDonald, TAC Coordinator * Ruth Suehle, Executive Vice President * All of the TAC volunteers
Planning for Community Over Code NA continues on schedule. Sponsorships are still coming in, which is good news. The CISA tabletop exercise is being finalized, and will be announced for 50 attendees. The target audience is recommended to be PMC members and designated security point-of-contacts with projects — or those who would, in a crisis involving a 0-day vulnerability, fill in either a role of developing, compiling, or distributing a fix. Instead of separate speaker and general attendee events, we will be hosting one big 25th-anniversary celebration at Meow Wolf Denver on the first night of the conference. Hotel room blocks will be closing/have closed on Sept. 16. Community Over Code EU We are looking for interested volunteers to help launch a new C/C EU event in that region in 2025. Discussions are underway with the previous volunteer team, and other interested members.
Community Over Code NA 2024 We are currently at 111 registrants for Denver, so a concerted registration social media push will be going out. We have had a renewed interest from sponsors, already surpassing sponsorship levels from the 2023 NA event, which is very exciting news. We have secured two keynote speakers, and have a solid line on a third. We will also be conducting a CISA-run tabletop security exercise for one half-day of the event. Community Over Code Asia 2024 Thanks to the invaluable support of our 10 sponsors and partners, the dedication of our 30 volunteers, the expertise of our 190 speakers, and the guidance of our 30 track Chairs, CoC Asia 2024 was a resounding success, held from July 26 to 28 in Hangzhou, China. Here are some critical numbers for the conference * About 1278 people registered for the conference, 863 of whom attended the meeting in person. * About 304 people registered to participate in the conference online. * For the three-day conference keynote sessions, we had about 104k viewers from 8 live broadcast channels (from China). * We got 25 community support booths besides the five sponsor booths at the conference. * We are immensely grateful to the 10 TAC recipients who attended the conference and provided invaluable support at the ASF booths and conference receptions. We will wrap up the conference videos and photos in the coming weeks. Please check out the three days recap videos here [1][2][3] [1]https://x.com/willemjiang/status/1817159419622576379 [2]https://x.com/willemjiang/status/1817557078174847416 [3]https://x.com/willemjiang/status/1818439677743153238 Willem Jiang On behalf of the CoC Asia conference committee
Community Over Code NA 2024 The CFP for Community Over Code NA 2024 schedule has gone out, and registration has been opened. The planners are currently working to find keynote speakers for the conference. Research into venues for the 2025 NA event is ongoing. Now that there is a "lull," we are examining new opportunities to co-locate conferences in 2025, as well. Community Over Code Asia 2024 CoC Asia 2024 will be held on 26th to 28th July in Hangzhou China. Conference organizers have finished inviting Keynote Speakers, and now have 160 accepted sessions, 182 speakers. They also worked with the TAC to provide 11 Visa invitation letters for the applications. By July 14th, there were about 450 people registered for the conference, 200 for attending online sessions.
The Community Over Code EU was held with very good success in Bratislava, Slovakia June 3-5. The organizers should be pleased with the outcome of their efforts. Reported numbers: 259 registrations, printed 252 badges, of which 122 were free tickets for speakers, volunteers and organizers. A post-mortem session will be held on June 17 to go over the highlights and problems that may have occurred. CFP for Community Over Code NA 2024 notifications have gone out, and to date only five speakers have responded with a negative. I am working on building the registration site, to launch before the end of June. We are also expecting a bid for av equipment for Denver this week. As referenced in the EVP report, Ruth has submitted RFPs to four potential cities for Community Over Code NA 2025 in hopes of announcing the dates and location during the 2024 Denver event. Community Over Code Asia CFP The results of the CFP have been sent out gradually since May 14th. We first notified the accepted proposals, followed by the rejected proposals, and there were also a small number of proposals (17) still on the waitlist where we have not provided notification yet. As of now, several speakers from outside of China have given up their speaking opportunities due to issues with travel sponsorship. After making substitutions, there are a total of 144 sessions. We have also begun inviting Keynote Speakers, the final invitation list will also take the funding situation into consideration when deciding. CFP for Stands The CFP for Stands has already closed. We received a total of 36 applications, of which 24 were accepted. The majority were Apache projects, as well as the most influential general developer communities or technical media in China, plus open source projects that have deep partnerships with the Apache community. Sponsorship Confirmed - 490,000 CNY, with 7 sponsors We are still waiting for confirmation from other 4 sponsors. Thanks, Willem Jiang On behalf of CoC Asia conference committee
Community Over Code EU * Pledged/received sponsorship $74,623.34 (includes t-shirt sponsorship) * Attendance: 153 attendees registered Community Over Code Asia CFP We have received a total of 216 submissions by April 21st. The session evaluation by 34 evaluators has already been completed, and we are currently making final adjustments. We are planning to accept about 145-146 sessions (it doesn't include the Keynotes). We will inform the confirmed speakers by May 10th. Venue https://asia.communityovercode.org/venue_travel/venue.html The hotel room rate at the Venue is from 300-400 CNY. Attendees can pay for the rooms with a visa/mastercard while check-in. Sponsorship Confirmed - 450,000 CNY, with 6 sponsors We are still waiting for confirmation from other 5 sponsors. Community Over Code NA * Pledged/received sponsorship $126,000 (includes speaker dinner sponsorship) * Three-year contract signed with Cvent for conference registration, badging * CFP evaluation ends on May 13, announcements planned to go out the week of the 20th, ideally.
Sponsorship funding for both the Community Over Code EU and NA events still remains low. To date, we have US$94,000 pledged to NA and ~US$46,100 pledged to EU. CFP for Community Over Code NA is doing pretty well, CFP closes on 4/15 as scheduled, with 205 total submissions.Track chairs are beginning their evaluation this week. The Community Over Code Asia 2024 CFP has receive 120 sessions submission as of April 16th, and the CFP will be closed April 21th.
Community Over Code EU * Speakers selected, information sent about registration, slides * Sponsorship still remains low. An email campaign for both EU and NA event sponsorship was sent out to 42 potential sponsors on March 12. Community Over Code NA * Cassandra Summit has opted not to have a co-located event in Denver. They now have a single track within Community Over Code NA * 16 sessions (as of 3/13/24) have been submitted in the CFP * CFP has been extended to 4/15/24 Community Over Code Asia * CFP ongoing, 32 sessions submission by March 15th
Community Over Code EU: * Sessions are nearly finalized * Two sponsors are in process of payment, more needed (see Exec VP's report) * TAC and event organizers are reviewing arrangements for passes and hotel room blocks * The next board's F2F will be held the weekend before C/C EU, in Bratislava. Details to come. Community Over Code NA: * CFP will launch week of Feb. 26 * Two sponsors are in process of payment, more needed * Cassandra Summit will be co-located with C/C NA 2024. We are in the process of figuring out logistics, sponsorships
Community Over Code EU * Call for Presentations closed, reviewing underway * Latest report, day of CFP closing, 217 submissions from 166 speakers * Sponsorship drive in progress Community Over Code NA * Call for Tracks completed * CFP to open sometime in January, reviewing Sessionize as a potential CFP tool * Sponsorship drive in progress Community Over Code Asia Call for tracks opened Creating asia.communityovercode.org domain for event website
Planning for Community Over Code EU[1] proceeds apace. A joint (with C/C NA) prospectus has gone out, and social media content is continuing to be posted about the CFP, closing January 12, 2024. The planning team is doing solid work coordinating all the different parts of this new EU flagship event. Community Over Code NA[2] has announced its date and venue, and will open its CFP in January, after the close of the EU event's CFP. I will be asking for tracks and chairs this week. Community Over Code Asia 2024 will be held from July 26 to 28 in Hangzhou, China. [1] https://eu.communityovercode.org/ [2] https://communityovercode.org/
Rich Bowen has stepped down as VP Conferences. Responsibility for conferences will now live under Marketing & Publicity. Planning continues for Community Over Code Europe 2024. The website and CFP are available at https://eu.communityovercode.org/
Community Over Code North America was held in Halifax Nova Scotia, October 7th through 10th. There were 251 people registered, and 200 actually checked in at the event. The lower than usual attendance is probably attributable to a number of factors, but we believe the most significant of them are cuts to travel budgets (which many attendees report) and inability to get visas. This latter factor cost us numerous speakers, including one keynote. The event was sponsored by Cloudera (Platinum), Instaclustr, Red Hat, Bloomberg, Gradle (Gold), Google, Inten, and Apple (Silver). Highlights included the keynotes: * Innovative Trends in Open Source AI communities - Charu Anchlia, Cloudera * Open Source in Africa and why you should be a part of it - Abigail Mesrenyame Dogbe * Why Open Source AI Matters: Towards a Clear Definition - Justin Colannino * Foundations Considered Essential - Mike Milinkovich Session recording was handled by a team of volunteers, and we expect to see the fruits of that effort in the next few weeks. Big thanks go to our planning team and track chairs: * Ruth Suehle and Brian Proffitt did the bulk of the planning and logistics work * Streaming - James Hughes * Big Data Compute - Uma Maheswara Rao Gangumalla * Big Data Storage - Uma Maheswara Rao Gangumalla, Owen O'Malley * Community - Sharan Foga, Swapnil Mane * Fintech - Javier Borkenztain * Groovy - Paul King * Search - Anshum Gupta * API/Microservices - Ming Wen * Incubator - Justin Mclean * Cloud and Runtime - Jean-Baptiste Onofré * Tomcat, httpd - Christopher Schultz, Jean-Frederic Clere * Frameworks - Ryan Skraba * Content Wrangling - Nick Burch, Tim Allison * Sustainability - Justin Mclean, Ștefan Stănciulescu * Performance Engineering - Brebner, Paul * Data Engineering - Jarek Potiuk * IoT - Christofer Dutz * Serverside Chat with ASF Infra - Drew Foulks; Daniel Gruno; Chris Thistlethwaite * Geospatial - Jia Yu, Marco Neumann, George Percivall
We're now in the final month leading up to Community Over Code North America. This year is posing new challenges - in particular, visas are extraordinarily hard to come by, and we have lost an unusually large number of speakers to that reality. But we are still forging ahead and looking forward to a great event in Halifax. There are a large number of other events happening around the Foundation in the coming weeks and months. These can be seen at https://events.apache.org Planning is going well for the EU event in 2024, which we hope to formally announce in Halifax.
The schedule for Community Over Code North America is now published - https://communityovercode.org/schedule/ - and registration is open. We are in the period of confirming all speakers, and contacting keynote speakers. We should announce keynotes soon, but are awaiting confirmation. This week, Community Over Code Asia will happen in Beijing. We should have a more thorough report on that event next month. Several directors will be present at that event. Planning is proceeding very nicely for Community Over Code Europe 2024.
The CFP for Community Over Code North America has closed and talk selection is ongoing. Registration is now open at https://communityovercode.org/registration/ Community over Code Asia will be held in August in Beijing. Details at https://apachecon.com/acasia2023/index.html
Planning for Community Over Code, North America, 2023, proceeds. The sponsor prospectus is now available. The CFP is still open. Details are available at https://communityovercode.org/ Planning for Community Over Code, Asia, 2023, also proceeds. Details are available at https://apachecon.com/acasia2023/ And finally, planning for Community Over Code, Europe, 2024, is under way. Details for that are still primarily on the planners@apachecon.com mailing list. Due to the late publication of dates for the two 2023 events, we found ourselves in conflict with a number of our PMC-produced events. Exceptions have been granted for several of these, which are, unfortunately, very close in both time and location to our main events. VP Conferences is making a much more concerted effort to stay up to date on event branding requests on the trademarks@ list, and VP Trademarks has graciously been adding those events to the list on events.apache.org, which is now much more accurate that ever in the past
Another quiet month. Planning continues for Community Over Code North America, Asia, and EU 2024 events. The CFP is still open and is slowly starting to get some proposals in. We hope to have more detail on the website in the coming weeks.
Planning for Community Over Code, our 2023 flagship event, continues. The CFP is still open. Meanwhile, planning for our EU event for 2024 has begun, with the hope that we can announce the 2024 event at the 2023 event. Planning continues for a China event in August of 2023.
I’m excited to share that today the Apache Software Foundation announced the next iteration of its flagship event, ApacheCon, as we reach our 25th year of the event. The event, now named “Community Over Code,” will be the annual convention of the ASF, offering a chance for the community to gather in person and showcase content from many of the project communities at the ASF. More details at https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/announcing-our-annual-event-community-over-code An Asia event is also being planned. The in-person conference will be held in Beijing China from August 18th to August 20th.
Proposals are still being received from multiple cities for ApacheCon 2023. However, at this time, we do not have anything definitive to report. We have renewed our agreement with ExpoPass for the 2023 calendar year, to provide ticketing, badging, and other related services for 2023 events.
Nothing to report this month.
Nothing to report this month.
Slides from ApacheCon North America 2022 have been posted to the website at https://apachecon.com/acna2022 The Cassandra track (Chair: Mick Semb Wever) submitted their event report a little late for inclusion in last month's report: We had three times as many talks submitted as we could take. Nearly all were high quality that we would have liked to have accepted. There were not many cancellations, which were easily backfilled. The venue and location was fantastic (though shame about some rooms being on the 8th floor). The time of year for weather in N'Olreans was appreciated by many as well. The hotel service around the rooms was sometimes lacking (though overall good), for example the water fountains were often empty and requests to fill them failed. We had six track chairs. It shared the burden but also made coordination at times a little awkward and slow. Four were from the same employer, the two others separate employers. Having at minimum this diversity among the track chairs was important, particularly as the dominant employer is the most active on the "community building" front. The double-blind review process had limitations as well as this dominant employer had submitted the strongest abstracts. If we had not done an additional non-blind review round it would have looked like we were favouring the one company. BoF was a success where we did a "Dream Big!" open forum, where folk raised the ponies they could imagine/wish C* delivering. We were concerned that a get together of committers/pmc would become an informal planning and decision making event, exclusive to those that did not attend. Instead it was a great opportunity for new contributors to catch up and gain insight on a lot of the tribal knowledge and intricacies of the project and codebase. The Cassandra project is regaining momentum, with a more diverse community. ApacheCON proved to be a vital event for us, at the perfect time. From bringing new contributors into the loop with what's possible with the technology (the invisible roadmap), to spending time with them to re-affirm the community's open (and welcoming) position to all commercial actors, to just a focus on renewed energy among the project's existing committers. Evaluating the talks, the most successful talks were about major new features where implementations contained novel solutions (in-memory Tries, Accord, transactional metadata), followed by experiences shared at scale (Apple, Bloomberg, Netflix). The room was one-quarter to two-thirds full from talk to talk (we had the big room). There was demand for streaming or recordings of the talks. All attempts were of poor audio quality. We've asked speakers to record their talks afresh so we can share them. We also had a number of requests from speakers beforehand for slide templates. The agenda app and website was poor. Hiding the agenda from the unauthenticated was unfortunate (inability to market it before the conference) and its lack of UX reduced audience fluidity during the conference (folk were more likely to just stick with a track). Thanks Rich and Brian, and everyone involved, for making it happen!!
ApacheCon North America 2022 was held in New Orleans, USA, October 3-6 2022.
We had 450 registrations, of which 345 actually checked in on site.
Attendee sentiment seemed to be overwhelmingly positive. However, a more
formal attendee survey is pending, and will provide more scientific evaluation
of this.
The event was made possible by our sponsors:
* Platinum sponsors: AWS, Cloudera, Google Cloud, and Gradle
* Gold sponsors: DataStax, Instaclustr, Red Hat, Salesforce, and Sonatype
* Silver sponsors: Apple and OpenSearch
* Bronze sponsors: Aiven, Datagrate, Bloomberg, and DBeaver
Special thanks also go to the track chairs (listed below), to our event
photographer Kris Traquair, to the Travel Assistance Committee (TAC) staff and
recipients, and especially to Ruth Suehle and Brian Proffitt, who did the bulk
of the work to make this event happen.
TAC recipients were on-hand to staff the registration desk and MC individual
sessions, througout the week, and were generally available on demand when
urgent needs arose. Many thanks to them, and to Gavin for coordinating that
effort.
(Note: TAC reports separately - look there for more detail on TAC recipients)
In addition to the per-track reports below, we also had Birds of a Feather
sessions most evenings, which were reportedly well attended.
Keynote presentations were pretty much all standing room only, with great
presentations from David Nalley, Kerry Donny-Clark (Google Cloud), William
Hurley (StrangeWorks), Paul Vixie (AWS), Demetris Chetham (GitHub), Sudhir
Meno (Cloudera), and Hans Dockter (Gradle).
The Lightning Talks (MCed by Ruth Suehle and Brian Proffitt), and the attendee
reception on Wednesday evening, were also well-attended.
On the whole, I am very pleased with the event, on all metrics.
Discussion of next year's event will commence on the Planners mailing list in
the coming months. We have several offers from third parties to assist in
production, and are weighing those.
## IoT: Chris Dutz
The IoT Track sort of worked well … we only had one speaker drop out
due to health reasons.
From an attendance perspective the Kafka IoT Track from Kai was definitely the
best visited one (full house) and I guess my PLC4X one was the least attended
one (6-7 people). Unfortunately, I don’t have exact numbers.
## Search: Anshum Gupta
Our only cancellation was a week before the conference. We had a speaker
cancel due to health reasons.
All other talks in the Search track were very well received. The first talk of
the day was the only one that wasn’t a full house but still had around 15
people. I believe that was because Mike McCandless’s Lucene benchmark talk
from the Performance track clashed with this one. All other talks had standing
room only and I had to start using the speakers’ chair for attendees at one
point. A few people had to leave Mike Sokolov’s talk when there was no
standing room so perhaps we could’ve done with a larger room for the track,
which I’ll remember for next time.
There were a few PMC members from Apache Lucene and Solr at all of the talks.
Most of them were able to connect with existing as well as potential
contributors and learn about their challenges and how we could be of help to
them.
I spoke to a few speakers and attendees from the track and everyone said that
they enjoyed the content and the quality of the talks.
## Libraries, Frameworks, Developer Tools: Matt Sicker
I worked on the Libraries, Frameworks, and Developer Tools track which took
place on Monday and Tuesday. We had only one talk cancelled (the one about
OpenNLP 2.0), and the rest were all held as planned. Most of the talks were
fairly well attended, and a couple were standing room only (if I recall
correctly, the Ozone talk was quite well attended). Some of the talks in this
track were related to other standalone tracks (e.g., Camel, Groovy), so that
likely helped with some of the interest, but all talks in the track were at a
level that was understandable whether or not you were already using the
presented projects (e.g., you didn’t have to be a big data nerd to understand
the Ozone or Zookeeper talks).
Overall, I think it went really well! While I reviewed the talks blindly
(i.e., without knowing who submitted it unless they included that in the
abstract for some reason which was a fairly disqualifying factor), the result
was a diverse range of speakers from all sorts of unrelated projects and
communities, so I think that such a track could continue to attract further
participation in the future (or at least something similar; if given multiple
days in the future, I could split it up into something like
maintainer-relevant talks and user-relevant talks or something along those
lines).
## FinTech: Javier Borkenztain
The Fintech track had some changes at the last minute due to the difficulty of
obtaining Visas from our speakers. Still, we managed to accommodate it from
our backup list, and all the scheduled talks were delivered as expected.
The audience for the talks was good, considering the topic's novelty at
ApacheCon, and that Fineract is a business applications and not tools or
frameworks for developers. But I expected more audience on the talks. The most
attended talk was about 30 people.
We had great conversations regarding the direction and actions of the Fineract
community.
## Data Engineering: Jarek Potiuk
The Data Engineering Track seemed pretty uneventful compared to others, but
possibly that's a good thing :).
I think most of the talks were really good and focused and gave the attendees
a lot to talk/think about. There were also a few unexpected highlights
("morel" language talk was one that I personally kept on having multiple
conversations about after the talk and the inspirational part of it was
amazing). I think the idea of adding "data engineering" independent of "big
data" was a fantastic idea and we both with Ismael look forward to making it
even better next year.
The audience was good - we mostly had almost-full-house.
## Groovy: Paul King
The Groovy Track organizers, the Groovy PMC, and the Groovy community overall
want to extend our thanks to you, Ruth, Brian, the TAC folks, and the rest of
the team involved with the conference.
We had a few speakers who pulled out early on but we had replacement talks, so
weren't impacted too badly. We had a couple of talks with only 7-9 attendees,
several that were standing room only and the rest were in between. We had one
afternoon devoted to some workshop-style content. We fitted this content into
the existing time slots. The content seemed to be well-received and I think we
would like to explore more workshops, perhaps with longer time-slots, for
future conferences.
## Cloud-native track: Rajith Attapattu
For this track and in general, there was a lot of interest in practitioner
reports or talks involving the use of several apache projects in building a
solution. For these types of talks the audience had plenty of questions and
often tried connecting with speakers afterwards.
Although we only had a day and a half worth of topics for this track(the last
minute dropouts didn't help) I felt the topics generated plenty of interest.
Shout out to the volunteers who were there to lend a helping hand.
## Geospatial: George Percivall and Jim Hughes
The Geospatial Track included five presentations and a capstone discussion.
Attendance in the track varied from standing room only for the Geospatial
Search with Apache Lucene presentation; to a handful of people for the
presentation on a new effort to define geospatial extensions to Parquet. The
capstone discussion session was a good mix of people representing projects
using geo to the people addressing geo across projects. A particular call to
action came from Julian Hyde, Apache Calcite, to increase the amount of
discussions on geospatial@apache.org between ApacheCons. This was the seventh
Apache conference with a geospatial track; The first geo track was at Apache
Big Data, 2016. It is recommended to have a geospatial track in ApacheCon next
year.
## Pulsar: Dave Fisher
Reports are that we had 15-20 people in attendance for each talk.
## Community: Sharan Foga
The Community Track ran over 2 and a half days. We had a few cancellations and
things - some visa related but I was really happy with what we finally ended
up with. I did start tracking the session numbers but lost the sheet! Mick's
opening talk was a full house with sitting / standing room. Unfortunately I
missed most of the first day due to an urgent dental appointment but I heard
that we pretty much kept the room at least half to full all the way through.
From the second day onwards I was in all the sessions and think the lowest was
something like 14 people. The few numbers I do have are - Jim's Apache Way
talk had 32, and How do put on a distributed event had 18, as did the talk on
issue management and bug tirage.
I think we had a great range of topics that were cross project so it was great
to hear about what Cassandra, Lucene, Airflow and PLC4X and others had done
around community - especially the lessons learned. I would say the format was
more story telling about real situations, real problems and real solutions -
which seemed to strike a chord with the audience.
## ASF booth: Sharan Foga
On the booth - I think we had the largest queue of any of any of the booths on
the first couple of days as people came along to check out the latest swag.
The items seemed popular and it pretty much all went. Some of the projects
were pleasantly surprised to see their project stickers. (Minor hiccup with
Lucence having the old logo but have resolved that). We also had some good
conversations and many people came back to just simply have a chat. Special
thanks goes out to the TAC team for helping out and smiling all the way.
## Tomcat - Christopher Shultz
Huge thanks to Rich, Ruth, and Brian for their work making this conference a
success. Also to Sharan for wrangling the ASF booth and probably getting sore
from handing out all that swag. (The one-shoulder backpacks are amazing. I
will bring that to every conference I ever go to from now on.)
All talks in the Tomcat track (1 full day) went well except for one with some
video problems which we believe were presenter-hardware-related and we got
corrected for a later presentation. I had all veteran presenters, so there
were no schedule issues or surprises.
It's too bad we don't have any official recordings of the talks (for all
rooms). I understand we (a) didn't have a sponsor and (b) didn't have any
volunteers to do that work, which is why it wasn't really possible. I think
Sharan recorded the Community talks herself, and I recorded the Tomcat ones on
audio. One of our presenters (remm) recorded video and I'll be trying to get
lavalier-mic-audio-plus-video mixed together for a publicly-releasable video.
Now if I can just figure out how to get the audio off the sd card...
With the notable exception of "Proxying to Tomcat with httpd", the Tomcat
track was essentially a bust. Usually somewhere between 2 - 10 attendees per
talk in one of the huge rooms (Rhythms II). jfclere's presentation had
probably 35 attendees, which is about average for presentations we have had in
the past.
That said, the attendees who did attend were quite interested in the content,
asked good questions, and seemed engaged.
The Tomcat PMC is discussing what kind of presence we should have at upcoming
events. Switching from US to Europe may change the "market" for our talks, but
none of the talks we did in the track were truly new (other than "New and
Improved [for Tomcat]" which is sort of a rolling-updates presentation we try
to give when we have a track). They were also given by committers (and PMC
members) and nothing from the community like "I use Tomcat to do X". So I
think we will have to try harder next time to get (a) fresh material and (b)
new presenters.
We had very high attendance for the @home events, so there is definitely an
audience for what we are presenting. This is one of the reasons we feel like
it's a shame that (official) recording wasn't an option this year: we would
expect that our "audience" is really folks who could not or would not travel
this year.
## ADDENDUM 2022-10-14
## Incubator, Justin Mclean
First off, thanks to everyone who helped organise the event, and it was great
to see people in person again. The seasons were reasonably well attended, with
up 1/2 the room or a little more occupied with the exaction of 1 talk, whose
low attendance might have been due to JimJag speaking simultaneously in
another room. There was good interaction with the audience, and many questions
were asked and answered. We had one speaker drop out, but they gave us enough
notice to be able to substitute our backup talk.
We are just one week from ApacheCon North America 2022, and so that has been the team's entire focus. As such, there's little to report, until after ApacheCon when we can look around at the larger picture again. As of this writing (2022-09-19) registration stands at 410. We have lost an unusually high number of speakers due to visas, but we still have a strong schedule, and expect to have another great event.
We are now about 60 days out from ApacheCon North America, in New Orleans. We are finalizing keynotes and sponsor keynotes, and other plans for the event. Further details at https://apachecon.com/ We currently have a little over 200 registrations, and are targeting around 350 for the event. Pulsar, Cassandra, and Kafka are planning community events, which are now listed at https://events.apache.org/ Here is the report of ApacheCon Asia 2022 There were 192 sessions with 256 speakers, 18 keynotes, and 17 tracks in this conference. Mark Thomas, the most productive speaker, submitted 4 presentations (including a Keynote speech). The big data track and messaging track both had 36 sessions presented. We had 23 track chairs and about 40 volunteers involved in this event. During the preparation phase, they collected pre-recorded presentations, added translation subtitles for the keynotes. We would like to thank our sponsors of this event Huawei, SELECTDB, Baidu, timecho, Amazon, API7 We had 2566 registrations on the Bagevent, and we sold 172 individual donation tickets (each ticket for 199 RMB includes 50 RMB donation to ASF) 91K people watched the conference (through all the broadcast channels), peak attendees was about 1K. 3 Days Keynote average visit 1.4K, peak visit 2.2K, the average watch time of keynote is 50 mins. The average session track visitor is about 600, average watch time is 30 mins. We added three new tracks, compared with Apachecon Asia 2021, they are “Culture”, “RPC” and “AI”， so it covered more areas and attracted more developers We invited some young talents to give keynote speeches, they are college students and are very active in apache projects, boys and girls. the diversity of the keynote is much better than last time. We have well controlled the expenditure and finally generated a surplus, which will be contributed back to the Apache foundation.
ApacheCon North America will be held in New Orleans, October 3-6. Schedule, registration, and other details are available at https://apachecon.com/acna2022/ ApacheCon Asia will be held online July 29-31. Schedule, registration, and details are available at https://apachecon.com/acasia2022/ Many thanks to all of the volunteers who have been involved in putting these events together. A survey was sent to the members list to begin planning for 2023 events.
The calls for presentations (CFP) for both ApacheCon North America and ApacheCon Asia have closed, and both events are working on schedules. We hope that both events will publish their schedules, and open registration, in the next 2 weeks. ACNA is in the process of securing keynote speakers, which will also be announced soon, as part of publicity leading up to that event. Sponsorship is going well, and those details will also be published to the event website shortly. The status of ApacheCon Asia 2022: 1. CFP: We got 250 presentation proposal submissions and will accept 200 of them. We will send out the speaker confirmation email in the next few days. 3. We are planning the conference promotion in the coming few weeks. In all, the event is going to plan, and we are very pleased with progress thus far.
The Call for Presentations for both ApacheCon North America and ApacheCon Asia are currently open, and will close by the end of the month. We anticipate that the schedules will be published shortly after that. Sponsorship for both events is still currently available. See https://apachecon.com/ for details.
We will be running ApacheCon North America 2022 in New Orleans, October 3-6. It is an in-person event, but there are several threads discussing augmenting the event with online content. Volunteers are welcome on planners@apachecon.com for all aspects of this event. We have opened the CFP for ApacheCon North America, and it will be open until May 23rd. https://cfp.apachecon.com/ We hope to post the schedule very shortly after that time. The sponsorship prospectus is now available at https://apachecon.com/acna2022/sponsors.html ApacheCon Asia has decided to return to a virtual model. We expect more information from them soon. https://www.apachecon.com/acasia2022/
We are on the cusp of announcing ApacheCon North America 2022, which will be an in-person event, in New Orleans, October 3-6. Because some details are not yet finalized, and probably won't be until immediately before the meeting, please see the EVP's report for late-breaking details. And look for a Call For Presentations in the next few weeks. Details will be at https://apachecon.com/ soon. Also coming up is the Kafka Summit https://www.kafka-summit.org/, April 25-26 in London. Apache will have a strong showing at this week's FOSS Backstage event in Berlin - https://foss-backstage.de/
We are in discussions to put on an ApacheCon in Moscow, in June or thereabouts. This will be run by a local company, and chaired by Roman Shaposhnik, who is currently living in the area. More details will be discussed on the planners@apachecon.com mailing list as they become available. We have started discussions and tentative plans for ApacheCon North America, in the September/October timeframe. This is still very cautious and tentative, as there are still many unknowns. We hope to have more detail by next month's report. A team is working on an ApacheCon event in Asia, and we expect to have a formal proposal for approval by the next board meeting. Other events in flight include Pulsar Summit (Pulsar Summit Global: May 25-26 and Pulsar Summit Asia: Nov 19-20) and Ignite Summit (June 14, 2022).
We hope to begin planning the 2022 event schedule this month. However, with the continued uncertainty regarding in-person events, as well as the uncertainty of international travel, we remain ambivalent about whether we will attempt to have in-person events or remain virtual/online for this year.
We are still in a quiet period between events. It is my intent to resume discussion of our 2022 events plan first thing next year. As such, I have nothing to report this month.
While we are starting to think about the Conferences plan for 2022, there has been no on-list discussion yet, and no actual decisions made. We hope to begin discussions in the early weeks of 2022. In particular, we need to decide on policies around vaccination verification at upcoming in-person events, and about how we will go about validating/enforcing these polices at those events. In preparation for that, we have put out some queries to other similar organizations about their policies and processes, and hope to have some templates from which to work once those discussion begin. We may need two sets of policies - one for official ApacheCon events, and another for projects or organizations who seek brand approval for Apache-related events (eg the upcoming Kafka Summit), due to the different levels of liability.
ApacheCon@Home 2021 was held September 21-23, and we are still in the post-event stage. Here's some numbers: There were 3555 total registrations for the event, with 61% turnout. (Hopin suggests that 51% is a typical show rate for free online events, so this is pretty good.) The event was sponsored by: Strategic: Google Platinum: Aceville Pte. Limited [Tencent Cloud] Apple Huawei Instaclustr Gold: Aiven OY AWS Baidu Online Network Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd. Cerner Dremio Fiter Gradle Red Hat Replicated Xiaoju Science Technology (Hong Kong) Limited [Didi Chuxing] Silver: Beijing SphereEx Software Technology Co., Ltd Crafter Software DataStax Imply Microsoft Securonix Bronze: Technical Arts Peak attendance at any one time was 711, which was for our opening keynotes. 1,393 people, in total, attended one or more of our keynote presentations. There were approximately 195 breakout sessions, led by approximately 240 speakers. (Numbers are approximate due to last minute changes to the schedule.) Top countries by registered users United States 1,341 (37.72%) India 440 (12.37%) Germany 197 (5.54%) United Kingdom 133 (3.74%) Canada 109 (3.06%) Other 1,335 (37.57%) Based on the post-conference survey (70 responses. More detailed survey results will be published soon.) 54% of attendees are Developers, 20% Architect. 49% of attendees were attending their first Apachecon, with 39% saying that they've attended 2-5 events. 71% of attendees said that the had only attended ApacheCons online so far. 70% of attendees said that they expect to attend an ApacheCon in the future. 29% said that they'll consider attending, but only if it's online. 1% said that they'd only consider attending again if it's in-person. 72% of attendees are *not* Apache committers. 44% of attendees learned about the event from an Apache mailing list, 15% word of mouth, and 20% via social media. All video from the event will be on YouTube at youtube.com/TheApacheFoundation (As of this writing, about 3/4 of it is already there. We hope that by this board meeting, it will all be available.) Details about the event may be found at https://www.apachecon.com/acah2021/ We are in the process of finalizing the event, and will update the ApacheCon website to reflect the events being over, as soon as the other work is complete. Meanwhile, we will begin to turn our attention to the future. Two main issues need to be discussed: * What ApacheCon 2022 will look like. * Using the Hopin platform for smaller project/topic events in the coming months. We welcome the input of the entire Apache community on these important considerations.
As of this writing, we are one week out from ApacheCon @Home 2021, and so that has consumed all of my VP Conferences time since our last report. We currently have 2000 registrations for the event. Given past trends, we anticipate getting another 50% (ie, 1000) in the last week before the event. This puts us behind last year’s registration, which is as expected based on the virtual event fatigue we’re seeing in many other events. ApacheCon @Home will be held September 21-23, and attendance details are available at https://www.apachecon.com/acah2021/register.html We are supported, as always, by many wonderful sponsors, who make this possible both with their financial support as well as the participation of volunteer speakers from the many many organizations that participate in Apache projects. This event is also made possible by the hundreds of hours of volunteer time, in putting together the schedule, updating the website, contacting sponsors, and, of course, the speakers themselves. I am enormously grateful to all of them for their hard work We look forward to seeing all of you at this event. We have begun thinking about what will be our strategy in 2022, with the slow return of in-person events. We are carefully watching various companies as they begin to set policy around a return to hosting, sponsoring, or attending in-person events, and hope to have more clarity about this in the coming months. We welcome any data or advice from others who are navigating this decision. We especially are seeking advice from anyone who has worked through the logistics of holding a “hybrid” event, whether successfully or not, as we figure out whether such a venture is feasible for us in 2022. Please bring that discussion to the planners@apachecon.com mailing list if you have such personal experience.
# Conferences - August 2021 ## ApacheCon Asia 2021 1. There were 140 sessions with nearly 200 speakers, 13 keynotes, and 14 tracks in this conference. 2. MingWen, the most productive speaker, submitted 4 presentations (including a Keynote speech). 3. The big data track had 36 sessions presented. We had 18 track chairs and about 40 volunteers involved in this event. During the preparation phase, they collected pre-recorded presentations, added translation subtitles for the keynotes. They also hosted the track in the Hopin. We would like to thank our sponsors of this event, Huawei, AliCloud, API7, DiDi, Kyligence, Tencent Cloud, AWS, Baidu, Imply, and SphereEx. Because the connection of Hopin is quite slow when accessing it in China, we had to use the Segmentfault[1] as the main broadcast platform to play the prerecorded video. We had 2169 registrations on the Hopin, 771 actively joined the conference, peak attendees 213, keynote stage visit 488, session visit 475. The data collected from the SegmentFault platform showed an overall 675K PV (page view), 300K UV (unique visitors) throughout the entire conference. Assuming each user could access the site 10 times, the total attendees should be approximately 0.7k + 300K/10 = 30.7k. In the Hopin, 1. The most popular session tracks are Big Data Room A (06 Aug), Big Data Room B (06 Aug), API / Microservice (06 Aug), Data Visualization (06 Aug). 2. The most active chatting platforms are Community (07 Aug), Community (08 Aug), Event chat, and Stage. Data obtained from SegmentFault, SegmentFault is open for everyone, we don't ask them to register. 1. The PV and UV for Keynote： Day1 52K PV, 24K UV; Day2 46K PV, 21K UV; Day3 29K PV, 14K UV. 2. The most popular session tracks with UV are Data Visualization(06 Aug), Big Data Room B (06 Aug), Incubator(06 Aug), Big Data Room A (06 Aug). 3 . The most popular session tracks with PV are Community(07 Aug), DataVisualization(06 Aug), Incubator(06 Aug), Big Data Room B (06 Aug). The Attendee score was 8.1 in Hopin, we got a lot of positive feedback from the message in Stage for the keynotes. One Attendant even wrote a song[2] after he listened to the keynote speech of Jono Bacon. And attendees actively interact with the speakers when playing the pre-recorded video in the Community track which made the Community track become the most active chatting platforms. Lots of attendees in the Hopin complained about the bandwidth issue of Stage (we used streamyard[3] in the backend which is much better then using Hopin ), and some attendees also addressed that they couldn't see the session video (which was played on Youtube). We had to redirect them to the Segmentfault instead. Although a lot of in-person technical meetings were held successfully in China during the weekend, this does not apply to online events. We should avoid holding online events during weekends since the data from Segmentfault and Hopin indicated a big drop in the attendees. We are planning to do a post-event survey. [1]https://segmentfault.com/ [2] https://twitter.com/willemjiang/status/1425002276280627214?s=20 [3]https://streamyard.com ## ApacheCon @Home 2021 Registration continues, with 1145 registered so far. We expect to announce keynotes next week. As we enter the final month before the event, we will be ramping up promotion, both externally, and through our project communities. ## Other events The following events are also approved and in our upcoming calendar on events.apache.org * Kafka Summit Americas 2021 - 09-14 - 09-16 * Pulsar Summit Europe: 09-23 - 09-24 * Pulsar Summit Asia: 11-20 - 11-22 We have, once again, strongly encouraged these projects/communities to check with the ApacheCon planners list *before* picking their 2022 dates, so that we don't end up with these kinds of conflicts again. In each case, however, planning had already progressed to a point where it would have been a great inconvenience and cost to change dates.
Everything is going well for our to upcoming flagship events, ApacheCon @Home 2021 and ApacheCon Asia 2021. Schedules are published, and we are still seeking keynotes for these events. Registration is open, and is also going well for both events, with around 500 attendees already registered for each. All Platinum sponsorships for both events are spoken for (they are limited because they are tied to keynote spots) but other sponsorship opportunities are still available. Over the coming weeks we will be ramping up publicity for both events, and filling out the keynote spots. Project communities have already been very active in promoting their tracks to their users and developers. Details about the two events are available at https://apachecon.com/ ApacheCon Asia 2021 will be held August 6th through 9th. ApacheCon @Home 2021 will be held September 21th through 24th Other upcoming events are listed at https://events.apache.org and include: * Kafka Summit Americas 2021 - 2021-09-14 to 2021-09-16 * Pulsar Virtual Summit Europe: Sept 23, 2021 - 2021-09-23 to 2021-09-24 * Pulsar Summit Asia: Nov 20-21, 2021 - 2021-11-20 to 2021-11-22
At the time of this writing, we are in the process of confirming accepted/rejected proposals for presentations, and crafting the schedule, for ApacheCon @Home 2021, and we are in the process of contacting potential keynote speakers. We hope that by the time of this meeting we have a preliminary schedule published. ApacheCon Asia 2021 has published their schedule at https://apachecon.com/acasia2021/tracks.html
The Call for Presentations for both of our events - ApacheCon @Home and ApacheCon Asia - have closed, and we are in the process of selecting our schedules. We hope to have a schedule announced by early June, although we will likely trickle out some of the track schedules as they are ready. Sponsors for the two events are going up onto the website this week, and should be up by the time of this meeting: https://apachecon.com/acah2021/sponsors.html and https://apachecon.com/acasia2021/sponsorship.html respectively. Platinum sponsorships are sold out, but other levels are available. The events will once again feature more than 20 project/topic content tracks, and span three days of content each. The events will be online, and registration will once again be free. Registration for ApacheCon @Home is now open, and registration for ApacheCon Asia is expected to open in the next week or two. Last month we ran an event for Cassandra - "Apache Cassandra 4.0 World Party", which had 1115 registrations. In June we will be hosting "Pulsar Summit North America 2021" - https://pulsar-summit.org/ - with a Europe and Asia event to follow later in the year. Kafka summit - https://www.kafka-summit.org/ - was held May 11-12, and there will be two more Kafka events in July and September. Projects who are interested in hosting events on our conference platform are encouraged to get in touch with the planners mailing list - planners@apachecon.com - for details of requirements and process.
Registration for ApacheCon @Home 2021 is now open at https://www.apachecon.com/acah2021/register.html The Call for Presentations will close on May 3rd. Platinum sponsorship is sold out, and other sponsorship levels are still available at https://www.apachecon.com/acah2021/sponsors.html Many thanks to everyone who has stepped up to make this event happen!
On Monday, March 8th, we announced[conf1] the Call for Presentations for the upcoming ApacheCon @Home 2021. We expect to have registration live by the end of the month, and sponsorship opportunities available by next week. The website is also live[conf2]. Rather than trying to service all time zones, like last year, this time we will be running to events - one focused on Europe/Africa/America time zones, and the other on Asia/Oceania time zones. We expect to announce the Asia-centric (ie, timezones) event before the next board meeting. We have volunteers to run 20 tracks for the EU/AM event: API & Microservice Big Data Cassandra Community Content Delivery Content Management Drill Fineract & Fintech Geospatial Groovy Incubating Integration IoT Karaf Observability RDF and Linked Data Royale Search Social Data Tomcat This event will, of course, once again be online, like last year. Anyone wishing to participate in the planning of this event, or volunteer for any event duties, is requested to subscribe to the planners@apachecon.com mailing list and introduce themselves there. We are still operating under the expectation that there will be no ASF-approved in-person events in 2021. We will continue to revisit this situation over the coming months as the pandemic situation continues to evolve, and international travel restrictions change. [conf1] https://blogs.apache.org/conferences/entry/call-for-presentations-for-apachecon [conf2] https://www.apachecon.com/acah2021/index.html
On February 5th, the ApacheCon planners met to begin discussion of ApacheCon 2021, which will, again, be a virtual event happening on the Hopin platform. We have tentatively identified September 21-23 as the dates for this event. Although this has not been announced publicly, we expect that it will be by the time these meeting minutes are published. We are working on getting a CFP up, and will have a call for track chairs very soon also. Additionally, the following events have been approved for 2021: * May 11-13. Kafka Summit Europe * May 25. Apache Ignite Summit * August 6th-8th. ApacheCon Asia * September 14-16. Kafka Summit Americas Plans discussed late last year to do some kind of internal "training" events have fallen victim to lack of availability. However, the VP Conferences is attempting to find more ways to delegate portions of the job, so that this is not a SPOF going forward.
A report was expected, but not received
Apologies for the late report. I'm on vacation this week and forgot. A few weeks ago we hosted the Pulsar Summit, which had the following turnout: 44 Speakers / Asia, South & North America, Europe 53 Sessions / 2 Days / 8 Keynotes + 3 Tracks 863 Registrations (Hopin + HuoDongXing.com, Huodongxing.com is for China Registration) 300+ Companies Represented 100 Attendees for Online Workshop 7 Sponsors 10 Community Partners 4 Media Partners Overall, the community was very pleased with the event. We are in talks with the Tomcat community to use our event platform for an upcoming event early next year.
In the days since my last report, we have put all video from ApacheCon @Home 2020 - 306 videos! - on YouTube. They can be seen here - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU2OcwpQkYCy_awEe5xwlxGTk5UieA37m - and are also available divided into playlists for each track of the event. Since getting that task done, we have been taking a break. In the coming months we hope to have a plan to use the remainder of our Hopin subscription for smaller, project/topic focused events. Later this month, we will be hosting the Pulsar Summit Asia - https://pulsar-summit.org/ - on our Hopin account. There are no other events scheduled in the coming quarter.
## ApacheCon @Home 2020, Sept 29 - Oct 1 The main event in the past month was, of course, ApacheCon @Home 2020, which we ran online - our first virtual conference. Overall, and by all measures, we believe this event was a big success. We wrote more about this here: https://blogs.apache.org/conferences/entry/apachecon-home-2020-was-a We had 5743 registrations, of which 3348 actually attended some portion of the event. (58.3%) Attendance was split fairly evenly between North America, Europe, and Asia, with other parts of the world being less well represented. However, we had more attendance from Africa and South America than we have seen in the past. The virtual platform gave us access to a new audience, as well as new speakers, who would never travel to an in-person event. 66.7% of speakers who responded to the speaker survey reported that this was their first ApacheCon presentation. 82.9% of attendees reported that this was their first ApacheCon. One of the major stated goals of ApacheCon is community building, and this event clearly brought in more of a global community than we have seen at our events before. All sessions were recorded, and we are in the process of uploading all of that content to YouTube. As of this writing, all plenary sessions have been uploaded. By meeting time, we expect most sessions to be uploaded. They will be organized in per-track playlists, for easier promotion by our various project communities. Videos will appear at https://www.youtube.com/theapachefoundation A huge thank you goes to the track chairs, without whom this would have been completely impossible: Big Data: Dinesh Chitlangia, Marton Elek Camel/Integration: Zoran Regvart, María Arias de Reyna Domínguez Cassandra: Nate McCall Community: Sharan F Content Delivery: Dave Neuman cTAKES: Finan, Sean Fineract: Ed Cable, Javier Borkenztain Geode: Anthony Baker geospatial: Jim Hughes, George Percivall Groovy: Paul King httpd/Web: Issac Goldstand, Nick Kew Ignite: Denis Magda Incubator: Justin Mclean IoT: Trevor Grant, Christofer Dutz Jena: Claude Warren Karaf: Jean-Baptiste Onofré Machine Learning: Felix Cheung Mahout: Trevor Grant Observability: Sheng Wu OpenOffice: Peter Kovacs Pulsar/Bookkeeper: Sijie Guo Royale: Andrew Wetmore Solr/Lucene (Search): Anshum Gupta Streaming: Felix Cheung Tomcat: jean-frederic clere, Christopher Schultz Apache@China (Mandarin Track): Sheng Wu Flagon: Joshua C. Poore (The Flagon track ended up being canceled, but Joshua put in all the work anyway.) Big thanks also go to: Ruth Suehle, who handled most of the sponsor interactions, but also helped enormously with the situation with the New Orleans Sheraton earlier in the year, which, in turn, made this event possible. Brian Proffitt, who helped with a ton of the back-end stuff, including keeing the Hopin.to platform in sync with our schedule spreadsheets, chasing down unresponsive speakers, managing our social media feeds, and speaker training/support during the event itself. Sam Ruby, who wrote handy scripts that converted between data formats, to convert our schedule pages into actual calendar (ics) files. ## Lessons learned While there were, of course, some technical challenges, the platform performed well for most speakers and attendees. The platform vendors have been very responsive to our feedback, and we anticipate enhancements which will make any future events even better. That said, doing an event of this scale - 24+ session tracks, and two timezone blocks - had some significant challenges. Discussions around how we might handle future events are already ongoing. Possibly doing more regional-specific events, rather than trying to cover the whole world at once, would result in better speaker/attendee experience. For example, we had some speakers giving talks at 2 or 3am local time, and of course many attendees could not see the content they were interested in, because it was similarly timed for their local time zone. We are also watching other events with online models, and how they are addressing these similar problems, without simply being a YouTube playlist without any kind of interaction. ## 2021 and beyond. Our contract with the conference platform vendor is for a whole year, and so we are looking at ways to take advantage of that investment. We would like to do smaller (smaller attendance, smaller range of topics, smaller number of sessions) events in the coming months, and will be reaching out to projects soon, once this event is completely put to bed. We believe that this will be more manageable, and thus give better experience to speakers and attendees, while also being more attractive to sponsors, if we choose to make these sponsored events. We currently do not anticipate doing any in-person events in 2021, but continue to watch the travel policies at large tech companies, and use that as a guide on whether in-person events make sense. As we (hopefully) return to in-person events in 2022, we will be investigating what a hybrid model looks like, maintaining the best of both worlds, while still controlling costs. We welcome your input into these conversations, on the planners@apachecon.com mailing list. ## Pulsar Summit The first post-ApacheCon event to use the Hopin.to event platform is Pulsar Summit, which will be held November 28-29, 2020, and further information is at https://pulsar-summit.org/en/event/asia-2020 ## COSCon and Apache China Roadshow The Apache China Roadshow will be held October 24-25, as part of COSCon 2020. Further details are available at https://programmersought.com/article/65545569898/
We are in the final stretch leading up to ApacheCon @Home 2020, which will be held September 29th - October 1st, at https://apachecon.com/acah2020. As of today (September 8th) we have 2550 attendees registered. At this point we're just making small tweaks to the talk schedule, and working with sponsors to get all of their content and sponsored keynotes on the website. We have 8 Platinum sponsors, one Gold, and two Bronze. We are working on criteria to make the Hopin platform available to other projects, after ApacheCon, since the Hopin contract is a year-long subscription, with unlimited events. We hope to present this plan to the President a few weeks after ApacheCon. Meanwhile, we are hosting Pulsar Summit as a pilot of that plan, to figure out how it's going to work, working with a PMC to host an event. Pulsar Summit is scheduled for November 27th - 29th. We continue to carefully watch travel bans at major tech companies, as we consider what we'll do in 2021. Most companies we have been watching have banned conference travel through June of 2021, so it seems likely that we will continue doing virtual events through 2021 at least.
ApacheCon @Home 2020 is now 41 days out (as of board meeting date). We currently have: 1619 registrations 2540 USD in (optional!) ticket sales 3 keynotes 285 sessions 6 Platinum sponsors ApacheCon @Home will be held on the Hopin.to platform, September 29th through October 1st. We will be featuring content in two main time blocks - one focused on a EU/NA audience, and another focused on an APAC audience. The full schedule may be seen at https://www.apachecon.com/acah2020/tracks/ and is still being filled out at the time of writing. Content has been provided and curated by 29 different projects or communities, creating the widest (ie, most tracks) ApacheCon ever. It will also be the largest ApacheCon yet in terms of registrations. Lessons learned from this event, and other online events in general, will inform how we do events in the future, as audiences will expect an online component to events going forward. The Hopin platform is available to us all year, and after ApacheCon we intend to make it available to projects to do smaller one-day events. We will figure out details of this once we know the final cost of ApacheCon. We had the opportunity to help Fedora put on their Nest With Fedora event (called Flock To Fedora in non-pandemic years) - https://hopin.to/events/nest-with-fedora/ - when they were unable to get access to the Hopin platform in time for their event, and they shared our Hopin account for that event. They will be compensating us for their use of the platform. Additionally, we were listed as a sponsor of that event in recognition of our help. David Nalley approved this as President.
ApacheCon @Home is progressing nicely. The event will be held September 29 through October 1, and will use the Hopin.to platform for the event. The Call for Presentations (CFP) closes on Monday, July 13th, and we hope to publish a schedule within a week or two after that date. We are still looking for keynote presentations, and recommendations are welcomed. As of meeting time, we have 1078 registrations. While registration is free, attendees have the option of making a donation as part of their registration. Slightly less than 10% of registrants are choosing this option. As of this writing, we have three platinum sponsors. Due to the removal of space and time limitations on the event, we how have 25 different projects/topics that are organizing tracks at the event: * Karaf * IoT * Fineract * Community * Content Delivery * Solr/Lucene (Search) * Gobblin * Ignite * Observability * Cloudstack * Tomcat * geospatial * Graph * Camel/Integration * Flagon * Cassandra * Groovy * httpd/Web * HACKATHON * Royale * Pulsar/Bookkeeper * Mahout * Big Data * cTAKES * Incubator Event details, registration, and call for presentations are all available at the event website, https://apachecon.com/acah2020
A report was expected, but not received
A report was expected, but not received
ApacheCon North America will be held September 28 through October 1st, 2020, in New Orleans. We are still proceeding as though the event will, in fact, happen. The CFP has been extended until June 1, since attentions are elsewhere at this time. We are also planning to extend the earlybird registration deadlines out a few more weeks. We continue to seek sponsorship for the event, but have taken the step of offering sponsors to not pay until we have confirmed, for certain, that the event will take place. Meanwhile, we continue to monitor the COVID-19 situation, and watch other conferences in the same time period as they struggle with the same decisions.
In light of the World Health Organization raising the threat level about the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, we have decided, after much consideration, to cancel or postpone the three Apache Roadshows that were scheduled to occur in the next few months. Details have been posted to the blog: https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/notice-on-apache-2020-conferences Apache Roadshow, DC, scheduled for 25 March has been canceled. Apache Roadshow, Chicago, scheduled for May 18-19, has been canceled. Apache Roadshow, Seattle, scheduled for June 10-12, has been postponed until further notice. ApacheCon North America, New Orleans, scheduled for September 28 - October 1 is still planned to occur. Two more events are being planned, but we have no published details on them at this time. * Apache Roadshow, Europe * Apache Roadshow, China Individual event reports follow: Apache Roadshow, DC Apache Roadshow DC 2020 is canceled. Attempts were made to switch to a virtual event but we were unable to get enough speakers interested. Otherwise everything to shut it down is now complete: All checks have been returned, all tickets refunded, all vendors notified, all swag canceled, all food cancelled, and all speakers notified. Apache Roadshow, Chicago Website updated. Tickets refunded. Speaker notified of cancellation. Venues cancelled. Will file expense reimbursement for $30 fee at one venue (only explicit cost for ARS-Chicago). Apache Roadshow, Seattle Seattle roadshow has been postponed. No new date has been selected as of this time. ApacheCon North America, New Orleans We continue to move forward with this event. The Call for Presentation is still open, and we have received 52 proposals so far. This is about on track with what we usually see, with most of the proposals arriving in the last 2 weeks before the deadline, so we have no cause for concern here. We are receiving queries about sponsorship, and many sponsorship opportunities still remain open. Apache Roadshow Berlin Eu Roadshow Berlin is currently in preparation to go public (Homepage is in preparation). The date although is not fixed and we will wait for more details until we will fix a date but currently it looks like it will be August. We will try to prepare everything (without signing contracts) to be ready to announce a date as soon as we are confident with one.
Conferences We currently have 6 events “in flight”, with two of them happening in the next 3 months. Apache Roadshow, Washington DC. March 25-26 http://apachecon.com/usroadshowdc20 Apache Roadshow Chicago. May 18-20 https://www.apachecon.com/chiroadshow20/ The ARS Chicago launched CFP, targeted to close 3/20. At the moment is finalizing booking venues (will probably be done by board meeting), generating prospectus, and devising /executing on Meetup/University/tech incubator out reach strategy. There is no link on the top page of apachecon.com to the roadshow at this time, by design. We want to finish site build, which is waiting on registration plumbing, finalizing venue bookings, etc. Though we haven't finished prospectus yet, there has been some interest expressed in sponsorship. Budget has been approved. Apache Roadshow Seattle. June 23-26 https://www.apachecon.com/searoadshow20/ Seattle Roadshow is in sponsorship and agenda mode, and we will be inviting speakers starting this month. We have venue and amenities secured, and are planning a BarCamp in the spring to promote the main event. ApacheCon North America 2020, New Orleans, September 28 - October 3 http://apachecon.com/acna2020 The Call for Presentations is now open and we have received 35 submissions so far. Registration is open (as of meeting time). Apache Roadshow Europe is in planning. No details are available yet, although a June timeframe has been suggested. We are working on detailed Event Playbook documentation, at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CONFERENCES/Event+Playbook , with the hopes that our 2021 events schedule will be 1) planned further in advance, 2) have more consistency between events, and 3) be easier for our event leads, who will not feel that they are making everything up from scratch every time. Apache Roadshow China, October 24-26 Potentially in Beijing. No details are yet available.
VP Conferences took most of December off, and so little progress was made on ApacheCon North America. The CFP announcement should go out this week. Other North American roadshows (Chicago, DC, Seattle) appear to be progressing on schedule. Meanwhile, planning for a EU roadshow has progressed considerably, led by Julian Feinauer.
The full schedule of 2020 events is now up at http://events.apache.org ApacheCon, and two of the Roadshow events (DC and Chicago) have provided starter web presences for their events, at http://apachecon.com/ We are working on new event documentation - "playbooks" to ensure that our events become more consistent from one year to another, and that lessons learned are passed on to future events. These documents are at https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/committers/events ApacheCon North America New Orleans The venue has been selected and signed. The website has yet to be updated with this information, but that should be done by the time of this meeting. We hope to open the CFP early January. Brian Proffitt has agreed to handle promotion for the event, and is also helping with promotion of our other events. DC Roadshow 2020 Website is launched, ticket sales are open, and the CFP is open Location is confirmed and listed on the website. Endnote and Keynote are confirmed. No sponsor sales yet. Chicago Chicago Roadshow 2020: Website is soft launched (exists, lots of placeholders, no link on main page). Determining venue this week and next. After venue will generate budget (hopefully next week). China Roadshow * Date tentatively set on Oct. 24-25, Sat.-Sun., 2020 * City: Tentatively in Beijing, followed by a few meetups across a few cities, such as Chengdu, Xiamen, Zhengzhou (satellite meetups TBD) * Expected to have a sizable sponsors, such as Alibaba, Baidu, Didi, Huawei, JD Cloud, MSFT, OSCAR, Redhat, Synopsys, Tencent, Ubuntu Kylin, WeBank... * Prospectus is under discussion * Event website and CfP will be built around April or early May timeframe. Seattle Roadshow: * Venue reserved for June 10-12, 2020 * Prospectus drafted * A few sponsors approached, one committed * Agenda being drafted EU Roadshow in DE: * No final decision if we do it * Planned für late June or July * Multiple Sponsors approached, good response from two, none commited yet * Draft Prospectus exists Third party events We have a table/stand at FOSDEM, which is February 1st and 2nd, 2020, in Brussels, and have a number of people who have volunteered to represent us there.
VP Conferences took about a month "sabbatical" after ApacheCon North America, which resulted in rather slower response to issues for that period. He is back on the job now, and activity on the various event-related mailing lists has picked back up. ApacheCon Europe was held in Berlin, in October. While it was smaller than its cousin in Las Vegas, the event itself was great, with truly amazing keynotes, and a very engaged group of attendees. At ApacheCon Europe we announced tentative dates for ApacheCon North America 2020, which will (again, tentatively - nothing is signed yet) be held in New Orleans in the last week of September. Due to the closeness of ACNA and ACEU in 2019, we intend to skip ACEU in 2020 in order to get back onto a six-month gap between events. However, it is also being considered to alternate North America and Europe years, in order to have a broader range of date options. This has not yet been determined, and there are strong arguments on both sides. In addition to ApacheCon, we are building out or 2020 calendar of events, and they are listed on events.apache.org The list is currently: * Apache Roadshow Chicago (Proposed) - 2020-05-27 to 2020-05-30 * Apache Roadshow, Seattle - 2020-06-10 to 2020-06-13 * ApacheCon North America, New Orleans - 2020-09-28 to 2020-10-03 * Apache Roadshow China (Proposed) - 2020-10-24 to 2020-10-26 An event has also been proposed in DC in May, but it is unclear at this time whether this is a Roadshow or something else. A call for volunteers to manage Small Events was sent to the members list. Isaac Goldstand has stepped forward to manage that process, but other volunteers are still welcome to assist in that. We intend for it to be a very lightweight process. The goal is to encourage small events such as meetups, focused on Apache technologies. A budget was approved for this for the past several years, but we have not, to date, spent any of that budget. A discussion is ongoing on the planners list regarding policy around approving events that conflict with other Apache official events. This begins with defining what a conflict is. Member input into that is welcomed on that list (planners@apachecon.com). You should expect to see more calls for volunteers around 2020 and 2021 events in the coming weeks, as we try to be more aggressive about announcing our event schedule further in advance. This makes sponsor acquisition easier, and also helps avoid conflicts with other conferences in our ecosystem. A new photo site has been launched at photos.apachecon.com in order to have our event photographs all in one place, which we control and back up. This was largely spurred by the recent changes to the Flickr limits, which resulted in many of our historic photographs disappearing. If you have photographs from past events, please contact the planners list for information on how to share them with the community.
ApacheCon Europe will be held in Berlin next week. Current expected attendance is 250. In addition to the Open Source Design workshop being held on the 25th from 10:00 to 14:00, Airflow and OpenOffice are both also planning off-location hackathon/workshops. We were also approached by Opensource.berlin about partnership with their planned meetup, although this will be a lower-key cooperation. As already noted in the treasurer's report, sponsorship sales are low. We have begun discussion of venues and dates for ApacheCon North America 2020. There is one roadshow (Seattle) in planning. They are considering the first week of June.
ApacheCon North America Last week we held ApacheCon North America in Las Vegas. The final numbers are not yet ready, but we can report that we had 700+ registered, and, last I heard, around 640 signed in on-site. All comments I have heard so far have been overwhelmingly positive, with the exception of some complaints about the venue itself: * Rooms were spread very widely, and some of them were hard to get to for anyone with reduced mobility * Session rooms were *very* cold - although this is not unusual for North American venues. Next month's report will have more detailed statistics and financial information. Session recordings have been uploaded to https://feathercast.apache.org/ but have not been publicized yet. Videos have been uploaded to https://www.youtube.com/TheApacheFoundation but have not yet been published. We will be publishing, and publicizing, this content, over the coming weeks, but are now focusing primarily on ACEU promotion. ApacheCon Europe, Berlin As ACNA winds down, the decorations and especially the signing feather have been posted to Berlin. ACEU is our next big event. ACEU ticket sales have seen an uptick, that is mainly related to speaker and sponsor registrations. We sent out the speaker package with speaker registration codes this week. With the hope of continuing to drive ticket sales, we are preparing to reach out to the PMC's of the projects speakers are mentioning with a description of the relevant talks. We continue to search for ways to increase sponsorship levels of ACEU including face-to-face conversations with existing sponsors at ACNA in Las Vegas. We are moving on to the next level of finer detailed planning for audience movement and volunteer engagement at the venue. Talk lists have already been shared with TAC to support the creation of a TAC working plan.
Conferences ACNA 19 Nothing much to report, other than that everything is coming together for the event, which is now less than a month out. Registration is clipping along, although it may fall a little short of our goals. Sponsorship is strong, and our final promotion efforts are running. See you in Las Vegas! ACEU 19 Organization continues apace. Despite this being vacation time in Europe, NewThinking continues to work hard providing visas for speakers, finalizing organization of details like the speaker dinner, and etc. We are in the process of organizing space and food for the Movie Night, and finding a room for the filming crew. We’ve received confirmation from all but one of our invited speakers. We are holding two speaking slots open for potential sponsors, but will need to send notification to our waitlisted speakers soon. The attendees of the Founder’s panel also remain uncertain. We are currently up to 4 accredited press attendees: Heise, Linux Magazine, Deutschland Funk, and D-Zone. Press work to promote attendance has been extensive, including local and international news organizations, event calendars, and social media engagement both directly by us and via our partners. We need an organizer for the Hackathon in ACEU to send out an invitation to the communities attending.
ApacheCon North America Registration is open, and the numbers are coming in. As usual, there's concern with the numbers, tempered by the fact that we have a community which, for whatever reason, tends to register very late. The effort to promote project interest in the Hackathons has started. We still have a number of gaps in the schedule, from speakers who have dropped out, and for sponsored sessions. We hope to fill all of these in the next two weeks. We are wrapping up last minute details, and are mostly focused on promotion at this point. ApacheCon Europe Sponsorships: We currently have 4 sponsors (one at each level plus a second one at gold level). This level of sponsorship is low. Sally is coordinating with NewThinking to make suggestions and look for solutions. Ticket sales: We have currently sold 33 tickets. Our community tends to buy tickets late; we are not concerned by this level of ticket sales. Media relations: Sally and newThinking/plain schwarz put out press releases in German and in English last week. We have several media partnerships, including the Irish Tech Times for which Myrle provided an interview Content: We have sent out speaker acceptances, and formulated a schedule. The schedule is public We have all non-sponsor keynotes set, and we also know who our keynote will be from Google (Leah Cole). We still need to check acceptances, send out reminders, and replace any "holes". We have been working on Visa letters. We're trying to set up hackathon coordination, but it seems to not be "taking". Travel: TAC will be closing on July 18th (extended from the 14th). We have been coordinating with them.
ApacheCon North America 2019 The schedule for ACNA19 is published - https://www.apachecon.com/acna19/schedule.html - and promotion has started in earnest. We eventually had 17 project communities come together to curate the schedule. We have announced three keynotes: David Brin, noted Sci Fi author and futurist; Samaira Mehta, founder and CEO of CoderBunnyz and the Billion Kids Can Code project; James Gosling, father of Java and Distinguished Engineer at AWS. We also hope to have a good turnout of the Founders for a panel looking back on 20 years of the ASF, and forward to the next 50 years. Registration is open - https://www.apachecon.com/acna19/register.html TAC applications are open, with a June 21 deadline. Over the coming 90 days we will be focusing on promoting the event, finalizing sponsorship, and planning the on-site details. Steve Blackmon has stepped up to lead the organization and promotion of the Hackathon. ApacheCon Europe 2019 The CfP has closed and the track chairs have provided their feedback on their desired session count. We have also been coordinating with TAC (room-block secured). We have secured two keynotes, and are in discussions on a third. The founders session will fill the fourth of four keynote slots, so keynotes are very close to being resolved. Currently we are working towards creating a schedule, and other work has been put on hold while that proceeds. Other An event will be held in China, which was initially pitched as an Apache Roadshow. However, given the timing (just a few weeks after ACEU) we decided that we are unable to support this event in any meaningful way. Discussion of ApacheCons in 2020 has begun, with the hope of announcing at the 2019 events. At this time, there is discussion of various other events in 2019 and 2020, but nothing appears to have progressed past the discussion stage.
ApacheCon North America The CFP has closed. However, due to the inevitable outpouring of "You closed it too soon" emails, I have silently extended the CFP by 48 hours, since I simply do not have time to handle the influx of people sending me their proposals via email. As of this writing, we have 313 proposals, plus 6 spam submissions which I have already rejected. Additionally, several of the project/community/topic tracks are actively soliciting and curating content for their tracks. We expect to announce the schedule by June 3rd, if all the stars align and the review process goes smoothly. ApacheCon Europe ApacheCon EU has had a quiet month. The CfP is going well, we currently have 45 submissions even though we're well ahead of the deadline. If that is a good indicator we will have plenty of ticket sales. Ticket sales are within normal parameters. We've begun working out details of the Friday conference extension in Berlin. We have one workshop already offered for the extension. Chicago Roadshow As of this writing, the roashow is currently underway. By the time of the meeting it will be complete. We expect to have more to report on the day of the meeting. LATE ADDITION: Attendance was around 100. Talks were great. Look for a more thorough report next month.
== Summary == We have three events currently in flight, and a handful of other under discussion. We also have one event recently completed, which, by all accounts, went well. === ApacheCon North America 2019 === We are now up to 14 project communities who are curating their own tracks at ACNA19, plus the bar camp. In the last week, we had the Beam summit, and an Observability track, added to our lineup. We have signed on David Brin, well-known science fiction author and futurist, for our first keynote. He spoke at ApacheCon once before, about ten years ago. He'll also be signing some of his books on one evening of the event. The CFP is going well, although we anticipate that many people will submit at the last possible minute, as always. Additionally, several of our project communities are handling their own talk solicitation and invitation, outside of the call for presentations tool. The CFP closes on May 13th. Further details of this event, including the CFP and Registration, are at https://apachecon.com/acna19/ === ApacheCon Europe 2019 === Report proided by Myrle Krantz ApacheCon EU site is up including sponsorships, CfP, and registrations. We have presentation reviewers ready and waiting. We have announced committer discounts on the relevant mailing lists. We have had some minor hickups in the process, but are working out the kinks as we find them. Tickets are starting to sell, but we expect more once we can announce aspects of our program. We pushed the purchase deadline for "trust us" reduced tickets back 1 week to April 15th. Sponsorship sales are not selling as well as for ApacheCon NA, but we are actively pursuing sponsors and have several interested companies. === Chicago Roadshow 2019 === The Chicago Roadshow CFP has ended, we have enough submissions to fill our tracks for two days of content. The website has posted the schedule of speakers and is now focusing on driving event registrations. To drive registrations we are working with Sally to devise a social media schedule, and are monitoring actual registrations as well as site metrics on Google Analytics. We have one Platinum sponsor, Google, hoping to close more in the coming month. In addition to registration drives and sponsor pursuits, we will also be working on things such as location for speaker / reception dinner, conference swag, other odds and ends. === DC Roadshow Post-report === Report provided by Kevin McGrail: The Apache DC Roadshow with GMU went really well. Thanks to all the speakers, volunteers, staff & attendees. Many kudos received all around. From a financial standpoint, we came in just under budget though we have one sponsor who still owes a small amount that may or may not be realized directly. They are certain to help us with future events and I recommend it be largely ignored. As an experiment, we did record video for 1/2 of the event. I have all the slide decks and videos but video processing is taking a lot longer than I hoped. Posting those decks and videos is considered the last task for the event. This event should be repeated for 2020. === Other Upcoming Events === As mentioned last month, we have offers of a number of other events, but nothing has progressed on these in the last month.
Overall, things seem to be going well. We have 4 events "in flight" right now, so it's a lot to keep track of. I'm very grateful for the independence and self motivation of each of the event chairs, so that I haven't had to do much for those other events. Each event chair will provide a sub-report below. ## ApacheCon North America 2019 The Call for Presentations is now open, and registration should be open in time for the DC Roadshow and the 20th anniversary announcements. ### CCC The Cloudstack Collaboration Conference has launched their own website, at http://us.cloudstackcollab.org/ to promote their event. We anticipate that several of the other tracks/summits will do the same in the coming weeks. ### ACNA-IoT Track We haven't emailed specific projects bc I thought there was an all-user all-dev blast going out soon and didn't want to back-to-back spam, however I have seen one-off announcements going out from other tracks so please let me know. ### Integration track The Integration track of ApacheCon NA is scheduled for Thursday 12th of September in the Laughlin 1 room with the capacity of 100 persons. Zoran Regvart is the chair of the track. He engaged his colleagues at Red Hat to submit talks and sent an e-mail to dev@ ActiveMQ, Airflow, Arrow, Beam, CXF, Falcon, Flume, Ignite, Kafka, Karaf, Lens, MetaModel, NiFi, Pulser, RocketMQ, Spark and Storm projects highlighting the Integration track and encouraging submissions. Additional invitation was extended to Camel dev@ and users@ with the offer to help with topics and submissions. ## ApacheCon Europe 2019 Myrle: ApacheCon Berlin is humming along. Sharan got our website up, we've finalized the sponsor prospectus, and gotten the registration system up and running. Once the prospectus was finalized, Sally needed only 90 minutes to sell the first Platinum sponsorship. The first ticket sale (with a 40 euro donation to the ASF!) was also quite fast. The first pubic announcement for ApacheCon Berlin has gone out on the coattails of the DC Roadshow. We are coordinating with ApacheCon Las Vegas as tightly as possible including on sponsorship prices and on keynote speakers. Paul of NewThinking and Myrle have a weekly meeting for Monday morning (CET) where we will coordinate whatever comes up. And Sharan, as the event sponsor ambassador has been coordinating with Nina of NewThinking as well. Still on our todo list: get the CfP system up, get an announcement out that focuses on Berlin, get our keynotes lined up, coordinate with TAC, and get more track chairs on board. ## DC Roadshow KAM: The DC Roadshow is going well. We are in the black financially. The biggest concern is putting butts in seats. Lots of work is ongoing to do that. Otherwise, I expect the event to be a big success and look forward to repeating it. ## Chicago Roadshow Trevor: CFP is Closed- except for "Apache in Adtech" and "Apache in Startups" track, still waiting on a few proposals to fill those out. I've created a gdoc on which-track-which-day. Next step is to email selected talks (a correctly filled out abstract was selected, but they all look good except one maybe-questionable-maybe-just-a-bad-abstract). After all of that, will post schedule and start promoting the event. So far we've sold 4 tickets. Will be updating website soon wrt GCP sponsorship (once I get green light that its been signed?).
Planning is proceeding well for all of our in-flight events. The DC Roadshow is now just a few weeks out, and we are actively promoting and attempting to fill seats. We encourage you to follow @apachecon on Twitter, and help us amplify that message. We now have 12 different projects/communities/topics who have claimed a track at ApacheCon North America, which we are very excited about. Other aspects of this event planning are progressing. We expect to have a CFP available this week or first thing next week. ACEU19 planning is also progressing. There is a discussion item in today's agenda to get consensus on moving forward with the agreement. One of the venues for the Chicago Roadshow was lost, and has been replaced. Planning for that event is also progressing well.
ApacheCon North America 2019 is progressing well, with planning meetings happening with the producer, and both a timeline and a budget being discussed. The Chicago roadshow has been announced to project dev and user lists, and the CFP opened.
ACNA19 This month we have made good progress towards ApacheCon North America 2019. Meetings have started with our producer. We are hoping to open the CFP in January, as we're waiting for a new version of the CFP system from our vendor. We reached out to projects to offer them the opportunity to run their own mini-conference, track, summit, or whatever they choose to call it, as part of our event, as we continue our march towards ApacheCon being a convention of project conferences. We have received requests from 6 projects or topic communities, plus at least one which is discussing it on their mailing list. Once we have a track/room grid documented, we'll begin slotting these into the available space. ACEU19 Meetings have resumed with our producer for ApacheCon Europe 2019. Myrle Krantz is leading that effort, and is working with our producer to nail down details. The event will be held in Berlin at the Kulturbrauerei where we held our 2018 EU event. DC Roadshow The DC Roadshow has been rescheduled for Monday, March 25th, 2019. We hope to re-launch promotion for this event soon. Kevin McGrail is the lead for that event. Chicago Roadshow Trevor Grant continues to work towards a 2019 Roadshow in Chicago, May 13-14 2019, in Logan Square. Look for more details in the next month or two.
We have signed a contract to produce ApacheCon North America 2019 at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas, September 9th through 12th, 2019. We have also entered an agreement with Virtual for the production of that event. You will see announcements over the coming days, to every mailing list you're on, about this event, and we ask that you help amplify that message. The DC road show has been postponed, due to a variety of difficulties with sponsors, and with the venue. We hope to have an updated date for that event within the next few weeks. Discussion continues around the Chicago Road Show, 2019, with a proposal for the event being submitted by, and championed by, Trevor Grant. Discussion around ApacheCon EU 2019 has stalled, and we need to get that going again. Two people have stepped up to assist with that effort so that I, Rich, don't have to carry that event myself, and this is hugely appreciated.
Last month we held ApacheCon North America in Montreal. By all possible measures, it was a success. We oversold tickets by roughly 20%. We recovered costs, and even came out ahead, financially. Comments from attendees were overwhelmingly positive. A more complete event report will be sent to the Board of Directors in the coming weeks, once final numbers are in. We are now heading towards the DC Roadshow - http://www.apachecon.com/usroadshow18/ - which is to be held at George Mason University on December 4th. The call for papers closed 2 days ago (as of meeting time) and schedule selection is ongoing. We have begun promotion of the event, and will ramp this up once we have a schedule. Other events which are in flight are: ApacheCon North America: we are working on a venue contract, and I anticipate that we'll have something in-hand by meeting time. We will, tentatively, be in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, on the week of September 8-14, 2019. This event will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation, and we strenuously encourage directors and officers to plan to attend. We also ask that you reach out to colleagues from the early days of the Foundation who may not be reading our lists any more, and encourage them to attend the celebration. ApacheCon Europe: We are in discussions with a producer to have ApacheCon Europe in the Autumn of 2019 in Berlin. This discussion has slowed down during the ApacheCon busy period, and we hope to reboot this in the next few weeks. Apache Roadshow Chicago (2019): Discussion is ongoing around an Apache Roadshow in Chicago. We do not have any details at this point, but we do have an enthusiastic group of volunteers dedicated to making it happen. Coordination of all of these events happens on two lists: dev@community.apache.org for general discussion and feedback; planners@apachecon.com for those actually willing to volunteer and make things happen. Meanwhile, the VP Conferences is taking a few weeks of semi-down-time, and you can expect renewed activity towards the beginning of November.
## ApacheCon North America 2018, Montreal Date: September 24-27, 2018 Location: Montreal, Canada URL: https://apachecon.com/acna18 We are, at meeting time, five days away from ApacheCon North America 2018, the 20th anniversay edition of ApacheCon. This is going to be a small one, so it is well to remember that this was by design, not by accident. We intended to do a small event to keep the cadence going, and fill the gap between two producers. Ruth Suehle has stepped up and helped us bridge that divide, and we expect an great, if small, event. As of now (when I'm writing the report) we have just crossed the 300 mark in registrations. The hotel is *completely* full. We are still substantially in the black, even with some unexpected last minute costs. Many thanks to everyone involved, especially: * Ruth Suehle, for everything * Kevin McGrail, for fundraising * Sally Khudairi, for marketing assistance * Sharan Foga, for organizing the ASF booth presence * Trevor Grant, for being our on-site person for the booth * Daniel Gruno, for printing, design, and other logistics * Daniel Ruggeri, for booth assistance and other planning help * Chris Dutz, who is hosting and maintaining our event schedule system * All of our sponsors and speakers Yes, I'm certain I'm forgetting lots of people. Details about the event are at https://apachecon.com/acna18 ## DC Road Show, 2018 Date: December 4, 2018 Location: Washington, DC, USA URL: http://www.apachecon.com/usroadshow18/ Event lead: Kevin McGrail The CFP for the DC Road has been opened, and notifications have been sent out to our user and developer communities. Since it's a small event, we anticipate a lot more submissions than spaces for that content. Planning discussions are ongoing, on the planners@apachecon.com mailing list. We are looking for speakers, and for a content committee. Please subscribe to planners@apachecon.com if you are interested in participate in the planning of this event. ## JBCNConf, 2019 Date: TBD Location: Barcelona, Spain URL: https://www.jbcnconf.com/ Event lead: Ignasi Barrera JBCNConf is a Java event that is always heavy on Apache content. They have proposed that we, the ASF, manage the content for a track or two, and produce a co-branded event. Details are still sparse, but they're looking at budget considerations and trying to find a date and venue. This conversation will be brought back to the planners list soon, since there are broader considerations that various people - notably Sally and Kevin - have expressed concerns about. ## ApacheCon EU, 2019 Date: TBD Location: Berlin, Germany URL: https://apachecon.com/ Event lead: Rich/TBD We have tentatively agreed to have NewThinking produce ApacheCon EU 2019 in Berlin. There are, however, no details yet. (NT are the folks that produced the Berlin roadshow this year, in conjunction with FOSSBackstage.) If there's someone who lives in Berlin (or, at least, in Germany) who wishes to step up to be event lead, I will gladly delegate this event. Failing that, I (Rich) will be the event leadon this. I hope that meetings with NT begin soon, but I have been completely focused on ACNA18, and haven't really given it much thought yet. ## Apache Roadshow Chicago, 2019 Date: TBD Location: Chicago, USA URL: https://apachecon.com Event lead: Trevor Grant Trevor has sent a proposal for a roadshow in Chicago in 2019. He's received a little pushback because what is proposed was a multi-track, 3 day event that looks much more like ApacheCon, and we are very reluctant to have an event that directly competes with ApacheCon, particularly in our 20th anniversary year. Details are still being discussed, but it's very much taking a backseat to other more urgent events. ## ApacheCon North America 2019 Date: TBD (September 2019?) Location: TBD URL: https://apachecon.com Event lead: Rich Bowen We are still looking for a venue for ACNA19, having determined that the proposed venues were too small. We hope that our 20th anniversary event is something that we can promote all year long and get a larger than usual attendance turnout. Thus, we are looking at several cities that are *not* in California. We hope to announce ACNA19 at ACNA18, and are actively working towards that goal, but it's looking iffy. ## Other Events We still have silence regarding a Seoul event, but we haven't attempted to rekindle that conversation since last month's meeting. If there's someone interested in stepping up to drive this, please contact Rich, or the planners list.
We are now about 40 days out from ApacheCon North America, which will be held in Montreal, Canada, September 24th - 27th. Registration currently stands in the low 200's, but we typically get more than half of our registration in the last month, so I'm not yet concerned. We are in the first stages of planning ApacheCon North America 2019, with venue and date selection almost complete. We expect to have a preliminary conference management proposal this week or next. We have had some unexpected delays around the DC Roadshow event, which may now be pushed back until mid-November. Discussion continue slowly surrounding other events, including: * 2019 Chicago roadshow * Collaboration with JBCNConf in Barcelona * 2019 Berlin ApacheCon
# Events/Conferences There is a huge amount of activity right now around events, and an increased need for volunteers to sustain all of it. We have people stepping up for various events, which is very heartening. As you can see from the list of headings in this report, we have 8 or more events that are at some point in flight right now. One event is over, but is still being wrapped up. One is less than 3 months away. The rest are in various stages of planning. We have updated the ApacheCon attendance spreadsheet - https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/foundation/ApacheCon/attendance.ods with the latest numbers that we have for all events, historically, as this is something that producers frequently ask for. We do not have financial information for most of our past events, due to varying degrees of producer transparency. Rich, VP Conferences, will be on vacation July 11th through 20th, and will have limited/zero internet during that time, but will attempt to attend the board meeting. ## Road Show vs ApacheCon definitions The terms "Road Show" and "ApacheCon" have been being used for about a year now, to refer to the different types of events that we are doing. Rich attempted to give some clarity to how these terms should be used correctly, to avoid confusion as to which is which. That definition is stated on the ComDev mailing list: https://s.apache.org/6OAU While the definitions allow for some ambiguity, it is hoped that this will clarify why we're doing different things around events, and will help planners, attendees, and sponsors to understand what we're doing. ## Apache Roadshow Europe 2018, Berlin, wrapup The Apache Roadshow in Berlin is now a month behind us, and Sharan Foga is still wrapping up some of the financials. We had approved a EU15k budget for her, and we are coming in almost exactly that - EU14,800. Full accounting for this event may be found in the event spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xqk-Y-Fys1gfRRmaomhDU6n0Ua-GtANBzK4vsf5VK7g/edit#gid=433313287 ## ApacheCon North America 2018 The next milestone in the ACNA18 calendar is the end of earlybird pricing, which happens on July 20th. At that time, general admission rates go up by $250. Reminder messages have been sent to our committers list, and to all dev@ and users@ mailing lists for all projects. This typically results in a surge in ticket sales. We have some early speaker dropouts, and will be digging in the fallback list as soon as our sponsored sessions are all filled out. ## Apache Road Show, DC, 2018 We hope to have the web presence and CFP up for the Apache DC Road Show up by the time of this meeting. ## Apache Road Show, Chicago, 2019 Trevor Grant will be leading the effort to put together an Apache Road Show in Chicago, in 2019. Date and venue selection are the first order of business. ## ApacheCon EU 2019, Berlin We have an initial proposal from New Thinking to produce ApacheCon EU 2019 in Berlin, at the Kulturbrauerei - the same venue as the 2018 road show. While many details still remain to be worked out, we are very excited to be working with NT again. ## ApacheCon NA 2019, Site search The site search for ApacheCon NA proceeds well. We received an initial list of suggestions in San Francisco, which I rejected because the "cheap" hotel rate was over $300, and this has been very poorly received by our membership in the past. We redirected the search to San Diego. I have received an initial response about San Diego, and have not yet had a chance to review it. A phone call has been requested with Virtual to discuss options, and I have not yet scheduled that, due to my upcoming vacation time. ## Seoul Event The conversations around a potential Seoul event in spring of 2019 have gone silent. We request someone with interest in making that happen to step up and engage with Edward Yoon. ## JBCN 2019 Colocation/Road Show A road show, colacated with JBCNConf 2019 Barcelona - see http://www.jbcnconf.com/2018/ for more information - has been proposed. There are no details yet, but Ignasi Barrera has stepped up to be lead on this event. A meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, July 10th, to discuss general details. I will update this report after that meeting if there's anything to report.
Conferences Board Report, June 2018 * EU Roadshow The Apache EU Roadshow was last week in Berlin, in conjunction with Berlin Buzzwords and FOSS Backstage. Apache had a lounge, upstairs, with icecream and stickers. We had many great conversations with many participants. In addition to the Roadshow-specific content, it's also worth noting that roughly half of the content for Berlin Buzzwords was related to Apache projects. Overall, we had a great showing here. We had a very productive conversation with the NewThinking producers, and we are considering cooperating with them for future events. The fit was perfect, and the event was brilliantly executed. * ACNA18 With the EU Roadshow complete, we're starting to focus more on ApacheCon Montreal. This includes: - Increased traffic on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ groups. - Publishing videos and podcasts from the EU Roadshow, with the additional message encouraging people to come to Montreal. This will hopefully also give us the opportunity to promote some of these on higher-visibility sites. - Calls for volunteers (http://apachecon.com/acna18/volunteer.html) to cover things that are not being handled by paid staff. - Periodic reminders to dev and user lists of the event. - Encouraging speakers to do their own event promotion. Members are encouraged to amplify all of these efforts in their own spheres of influence. * DC Roadshow While in Berlin, Kevin started working on the DC Roadshow website and CFP. We should have something to announce there soon. * Chicago Roadshow Discussions are ongoing about doing a "Roadshow" type event in Chicago in 2019. * Seoul 2019 A discussion about doing an ApacheCon in Seoul in Spring 2019 is in very preliminary stages.
Apache RoadShow Europe, Berlin, is just a few weeks away. June 11-14 2018. With assistance from Sally, the many speakers, and various projects, we are promoting the event. We have also started a discussion of how (and whether) we might cooperate with this event next year. http://apachecon.com/euroadshow18/ ApacheCon North America now has a schedule posted, and we have stepped up our promotion efforts, but are focusing mostly on the EU event until early June. http://apachecon.com/acna18 The venue search for ACNA 2019 is progressing. We still intend to announce ACNA19 at ACNA18. A proposal was received for a 2019 event in Turkey, and declined. Thus, we are still open to other opportunities in Europe for 2019. We have received proposals for 2019 events in Japan and South Korea. While there was general approval, VP Conference is not taking any direct action on either of those proposals at the moment.
# Events/Conferences This has been a very busy month in the Events/Conferences world. We have three events currently in flight, and several more that we're talking about. If you wish to be part of this conversation, you need to join the planners list - planners@apachecon.com. ## Apache RoadShow Europe - Berlin, June 11-14 2018 The schedule has been posted - http://apachecon.com/euroadshow18/schedule.html ## ApacheCon North America The CFP has closed, and we are in review mode. We had 249 sessions submitted. We plan to have a schedule ready by the end of the month. We have added space for the Cloudstack Collaboration Conference, which will run in parallel to ApacheCon, and the community is seeking sponsorship for this additional space. The GeoSpatial community has put together a one-day track. A reminder: There is a committer discount. This information was sent to the committers@apache.org mailing list. If you want your communities to turn up in force, it's time to make them all committers. Volunteers are needed for many parts of the show. Please see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VWJsUp0HSa2oH6yCbOJJqw5pgdxKt_m0R8yXUcQUA8A/edit#gid=0 if you want to help. ## Apache DC RoadShow. Kevin is putting together an event in DC in October. We have a date and a venue, and will be promoting additional information as soon as we have a website up. ## 2019 A venue search has begun for ApacheCon North America 2019. We are focusing on the San Franciso Bay area, for the 20th anniversary. Once again, please join planners@apachecon.com to participate in planning this event. The goal is to announce ACNA19 at ACNA18. A stretch goal is to also announce ACEU19 at ACNA18, but nothing has been done towards that end, yet. We are also considering several smaller events. These might include any of the following: * ApacheCon Africa * ApacheCruise * Apache RoadShow North America * Apache RoadShow Asia Any of these events may or may not happen depending on interest, project involvement, and sponsorship. We are beginning to pitch entire-year sponsorship packages, rather than per-event sponsorship, as this tends to be easier for corporate budgets, and ends up being a better deal for everyone.
Over the last month, much progress has been made on all currently-active events. That is, ApacheCon North America 2018, the Apache EU Roadshow, and the proposed DC Roadshow. The schedule for the EU Roadshow has been published, and this event is paid for and ready to go. Sharan has handled everything about that event. I (Rich) anticipate that I will be on-site for that event, but I am still sorting out details. Details of this event are at https://apachecon.com/euroadshow18/ The CFP for the North America event is going well. Sponsorship and other planning items are progressing smoothly. Two keynotes have been announced, and two others are in discussion. Details of this event are at http://apachecon.com/acna18/ Please join the planners@apachecon.com mailing list if you wish to help, volunteer, or be better informed. Archives of that list are, of course, available on lists.apache.org
Since my last report, we have made considerable progress on ApacheCon North America 2018. We have signed a contract with the Marriott in Montreal, the CFP is open, and planning is moving forward. Details about the event may be found at http://apachecon.com/acna18/ We have announced two keynotes, both of whom are Apache members doing great things to make the word a better place - Myrle Krantz and Cliff Schmidt. Registration is available at that same site. A significant Committer/Member discount will be announced on those respective mailing lists this week (i.e., the week of this meeting.) Additionally, we have an agreement with FOSS Backstage in Berlin to share some of that space with them for their event in June. Details of that event may be found at https://foss-backstage.de/ Our participation there will be called the Apache Roadshow. Both of these events are now listed on http://apachecon.com/ and details are being added daily. We had a sign at FOSDEM promoting these two events, and there was considerable interest in both events. Another "Roadshow" event is in the planning phase, for North America, later in 2018. Details should be available in next month's report.
We are still pursuing a small, collocated event alongside Berlin Buzzwords. Sharan has taken the lead for this event. We are also still looking for venues in North America for fall of 2018 for a full ApacheCon event.
This month we have been in discussions with the planners of Berlin Buzzwords and FOSS Backstage about colocating ApacheCon EU 2018 with their event in Berlin. There are still some things to be worked out as to what our event would look like, how we would co-market with them, and how big our presence would be in 2018. If there were a successful event, we would also consider pursuing a larger event in 2019. There has also been some discussion of a North America event later in the year. Ruth Suehle, who has worked with Flock (The Fedora conference) for many years has been advising us on various things, and may play a role in producing that event if we can arrive at a plan that everyone agrees to.
Since our last report, I've been considering options for a way forward with ApacheCon, in the hopes that we can still do a North America event in Spring 2018, and a Europe event in the latter half of the year. In the time since ApacheCon Miami, I have received numerous queries about when we'll be holding the next event, and lamentations that we didn't have an EU event this year. It is clear that our community wants this event. To this end, we'll be working towards that goal, and discussion will begin immediately on the planners@apachecon.com mailing list, wihch is open to members.
Nothing to report this month.
Nothing to report this month.
We will have a table/booth at All Things Open, and have had a good response from people willing to staff that presence.
This month we have had discussions with various other conferences about Apache presence at their event. We continue to await a bid for ApacheCon 2018, possibly in Canada, so that we can determine whether that option is worth pursuing.
A month ago we ran ApacheCon North America in Miami. We had just over 500 in
attendance. Feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
All audio from the event has been published to http://feathercast.org/
already. Thank you Sally for arranging a contractor to handle this editing and
posting. We also have all raw audio if anybody wants to repurpose any of it.
Various interviews with speakers and sponsors are still going on on
FeatherCast at this time.
All video from the event (keynotes and three additional tracks, sponsored by
Comcast) are up on YouTube at https://s.apache.org/miamivideo and we are in
the process of obtaining all of the raw video so that we can use that for
other purposes if we wish.
We will be further promoting these videos and podcasts on both @apachecon and
@ApacheCommunity in the coming days and weeks.
While at the event, we held a meeting discussing what ApacheCon will look like
in the coming years. The full notes from that meeting were sent to the
planners@apachecon.com mailing list, and may be seen here:
https://s.apache.org/kpgw (Members only.) While you are encouraged to join
that list if you are interested in the progress of this conversation, please
understand that this is a working list, and extended philosophical discussions
are discouraged.
In the vein, the meeting at ApacheCon was very focused on actual objectives,
and how to reach them, and was very productive. An enormous thank you to
everyone who attended, and who were able to keep this away from the
traditional complaint session we have seen in past years.
We agreed to pursue three tracks:
1) Participate more actively in third-party events, providing both standalone
"Apache Way" talks, as well as Apache tracks focusing primarily on The Apache
Way ("Community > Code") and the Incubator ("Tomorrow's Software Today").
2) Run ApacheCon as a convention of project events, but attempt to do so at
much lower cost venues, focusing on University and Government facilities,
rather than fancy hotels.
3) More inward-facing events, centered around F2F board meetings and Infra
gatherings - which we will be holding anyway - and then making the space
available for project summits and, possibly, sponsor meetings. Capture
high-quality content (video, audio) for later use.
I will leave the deeper details for the planners list, and encourage you to
read the meeting notes (linked above) for many of the details that are omitted
from this report.
In the last few weeks, Apache participated in Open Expo Madrid -
http://www.openexpo.es/en/ - spearheaded by Sharan Foga. We have also been
approached by several events requesting Apache content, in line with point 1
above.
And, pursuant to point 2, we have asked the Virtual events management team to
provide a bid for such an event. Tom Pappas has notified us that, were they to
take on such a task, it would involve an up-front retainer, which would
involve Conferences making a request for budget to cover this. This would be a
change from what Conferences has ever done in the past at the ASF, and so will
no doubt involve more discussion.
At this time, we do not have any plans to run an ApacheCon event in Europe. If
you are asked about it, please stick to three points: 1) We will not be doing
an official ApacheCon event in Europe in 2017. 2) We will be participating
more actively in other conferences - please see http://apache.org/events and
@apachecon for more details as we have them. 3) Please contact Rich Bowen for
more details.
We are in the midst of ApacheCon North America, with roughly 500 people in attendance. There will be a meeting tomorrow (Thursday) about how to proceed with ApacheCon events in the future.
ApacheCon North America is now less than a month away, and registration numbers are very disappointing. This will likely result in some of our more expensive activities, such as the off-site reception, being cut, unless we have an uncharacteristic surge in registration in the next 2 weeks. Meanwhile, we continue to investigate a venue for a scaled-back ApacheCon EU event later in the year.
The schedule for ApacheCon North America has been published. We have two primary events - ApacheCon and Apache Big Data - with schedules published at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-north-america/program/schedule and http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-north-america/program/schedule respectively. ApacheCon is further divided into mini-conferences, for the purpose of being able to do very targeted promotion of these events to specific audiences. To that end, we have: Apache Traffic Server and Apache Traffic Control Summit - http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-north-america/extend-the-experience/ats-summit BarCampApache - http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-north-america/extend-the-experience/barcamp ApacheIoT - http://us.apacheiot.org/ CloudStack Collaboration Conference - http://us.cloudstackcollab.org/ FlexJS Summit - http://us.apacheflexjs.org/ TomCatCon - https://tomcat.apache.org/conference.html We are depending on each of these communities to help us in promoting these events, and driving attendance. We announced a new type of sponsorship, where a community can band together to put several smaller sponsorships together to create one combined Community Sponsor. The details of this program are published on the conference website at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-north-america/sponsors/community-sponsor and we already have a few communities looking at how they might participate in this program. We consider this critical to building ownership of the event in our communities, even if it doesn't bring in an enormous amount of money. ApacheCon and Apache Big Data will be held in Miami, Tuesday May 16th through Thursday May 18th. BarCampApache will be held on Monday, May 15th. The Apache Traffic Server Summit will be held on Sunday May 14th and Monday May 15th. These events will, all be held at the Miami InterContinental Hotel.
The Call for Papers for ApacheCon Miami closed on February 11th, and we are now in the process of selecting the schedule. We have been working on splitting the CFP into topics and tracks, for easier consideration by our content committee. The distribution of the ApacheCon CFP was as follows: * Standard Content (Key signing, BarCamp, State of the Feather, Apache Way, Lightning Talks) 5 sessions * Apache IoT - 26 sessions, plus 7 OpenWhisk sessions * TomcatCon - 20 sessions * Flex Summit - 1 session (They're actually handling their call for content separately, so this isn't cause for concern) * CloudStack - 43 sessions * Cassandra - 6 sessions * Community - 15 sessions (Plus Apache Way goes here, too) * Containers - 10 sessions * Incubator - 5 sessions * Solr/Lucene - 4 sessions * HTTP Servers - 9 sessions * Big Data - 25 sessions (Looks like most of these are filed in the wrong CFP, while just a handful were submitted both places) * Other/Uncategorized - 56 sessions (This is the part that's going to be the hardest work) Total: 232 sessions The Apache: Big Data CFP attracted 193 submissions. The schedule should be announced on March 9th. The event has been restructured, as we have been talking about doing for years, into a convention of mini-conferences. This year, we will be holding the following events, each of which has its own web presence and marketing: Apache: Big Data Apache: IoT (Internet of Things) CloudStack Collaboration Conference FlexJS Summit TomcatCon Apache Traffic Server and Traffic Control Summit (Monday) BarCampApache (Monday) All other topics and projects will be run under the general heading of ApacheCon, so that smaller projects are still represented. Admission to any of these events (with the exception of the Traffic Server event) also grants you access to all of the others. Further details about this event layout have been elaborated in a blog post at https://blogs.apache.org/conferences/entry/final-notice-cfp-for-apachecon It is hoped that this approach will be much easier to sell tickets (because the event is about something definable) and acquire sponsorship (for the same reason). It is also hoped that other project communities will be watching, and see the benefits of being part of a larger gathering, and bring us their conferences next year. We continue to investigate the possibility of doing an ApacheCon in Europe later in 2017, but have no concrete plans as yet.
We are now one month out from the CFP for ApacheCon North America closing, so we are still not seeing a lot of action. So far we have 38 papers submitted for ApacheCon, and 40 for Apache: Big Data. While we usually get 75% of the submissions in the last 2 weeks, I do nevertheless encourage you to go ahead and submit your talks if you have something already in mind. Email will go out to our users@ and dev@ mailing lists today or tomorrow reminding everyone of the upcoming CFP deadline, and of the next registration rate change deadline. A draft of that email appears on the dev@community.apache.org mailing list. Another email will be going to the committers@apache.org mailing list with a registration code within the next few days. We had a very encouraging call with the Linux Foundation yesterday in which they went over their marketing plan with us. I can provide additional detail to anyone who is interested. Meanwhile, Sally and I will be coordinating with LF in the coming 6 months to promote the CFP, registration, sponsorship, and then doing post-conference promotion to lead up to the next event. In the past, we have stated a "requirement" that projects display an "upcoming event" image on their project website. A combination of factors have resulted in that no longer being a reality. In the coming weeks I hope to 1) provide the necessary images and 2) reach out to the various PMCs to ask/encourage them to resume this At the beginning of next month, we will participate in FOSDEM. This effort has been headed up by Sharan Foga and Daniel Gruno, as last year. We have a table in the expo area, and are producing various small swag items to give away. We have asked projects to step up to take an hour at the table to promote their project. We also have a number of speakers appearing in various tracks and devrooms. Further details of our FOSDEM participation may be found at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/COMDEV/FOSDEM+2017
Since our last meeting, I have been primarily focused on getting the recordings from ApacheCon Seville posted to FeatherCast. In this effort, I have been enormously assisted by Felix Schumacher and Sharan Foga. I hope to get the remainder of these recordings uploaded over my Christmas break. The CFP for ApacheCon Miami is still running, and is scheduled to close February 11. December is always a slow time for this, and promotion of that event will start in earnest at the first of the year. As always, if you have suggestions for keynotes, or can make connections for sponsorship, please get in touch with me.
Summary: ApacheCon Seville has a modest turnout, and I've started to turn my attention to making Miami a much more successful event. In particular, we (I) need to do a better job of communicating to our internal audience what's coming, and how to get involved. As we speak, ApacheCon is in process. Several of us are attending the call together here in Seville. We have 550 attendees at the two events, of which 136 registered as committers. This tells me that we are not doing an adequate job of communicating about the event with our project communities -- something I intend to rectify for ApacheCon North America in May. Sponsorship this year has been disappointing, and here, too, I have heard frequently this week from people who said that they would have sponsored if they had known about it earlier. It appears that our internal communication needs a great deal of improvement in the coming six months. ApacheCon North America (And Apache: Big Data) will be held in Miami, May 16-18th, 2017, at the InterContinental Miami. The websites for these events are now up, at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-north-america and http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-north-america respectively. I am working on the Apache Events page, at http://apache.org/events , in an attempt to make it more engaging to the community, and encourage communities to more effectively publicize their events, from the meetup scale all the way up to major conferences. I've refreshed http://apachecon.com/ to make it much clearer what the most important things are, and move distractions to sub-pages. I am working on an ApacheCon playbook - https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/foundation/ApacheCon/playbook.md to ensure that tasks don't get dropped in future events, as well as to make it easier for people to know where they can be of help, without getting in the way of the event producer. It is also hoped that this will assist other events that our project communities put on. This playbook will be forked, so to speak, for each event, to act as a checklist to ensure that everything gets done. We had a meeting with Linux Foundation, the conference produder, on Tuesday morning at ApacheCon in Seville. Present were Sally Khudairi, Sharan Foga, Jillian Hall (LF), Angela Brown (LF), Shane Curcuru, David Nalley, Nick Burch, and myself - Rich Bowen. Many issues were discussed, primarily focused on the events in 2017. ApacheCon and Apache: Big Data will be held overlapping in Miami - that is, both events will run Tuesday through Thursday, May 14-16. This saves money on space, and also increases the event population on any given day, which makes sponsors happier, as well as giving attendees a greater chance of interacting with other members of the community. Attendees who register for one event receive a complimentary pass to the other event. This is done primarily for tracking purposes - to see which event people are primarily interested in. Monday will be available for projects to have developer summits. Information about this will go out to various Foundation-wide mailing lists in the next 2 weeks, once we know how many of these events we have space for. The focus/theme of the event will be innovation. Projects in the incubator, or recently graduated, will be particularly encouraged to bring their content to the event. More established projects will, of course, also be welcomed, but are encouraged to consider the project summit route as a possible alternative. Tighter communication will be established between LF and ASF for the coming six months, so that fewer things are dropped on the marketing side of things. On my side, I'll be attempting to include a broader team into the process. While I will remain the primary point of contact, I will be more proactively delegating tasks out to a wider group. I encourage people who are passionate about ApacheCon to contact me to offer their time to this endeavor. Ideas were pitched including using Foundation funds to help committers or PMC members to attend who might not otherwise be able to do so. These ideas are still very nascent, and will be fleshed out more on the comdev mailing list before being brought as a proposal to the board.
WHEREAS, the board created the office of Vice President, Conference Planning, and; WHEREAS, the board created an officer's committee to assist in the work of Conference Planning, and; WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it no longer in the best interest of the Foundation to continue the office of "Vice President, Conference Planning", due to the overly broad scope of the office; NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Nick Burch is relieved and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of Vice President, Conference Planning, and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the officers committee to assist the work of conference planning be terminated, and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the duties of the Vice President, Conference Planning be performed, as appropriate, by the President and Vice President, Brand Management, Vice President, Marketing and Publicity and the Community Development Project. Special Order 7D, Dissolve the office of Vice President, Conference Planning, was approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.
NO REPORT
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors has previously appointed the position of Vice President, Conference Planning, to serve at the direction of the President; WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems that the name no longer matches the main focus of the role, and the main work done by the associated officers committee; WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems that the name Events Planning would better match and describe the role; NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the office of Vice President, Conference Planning, be renamed to Vice President, Events Planning, to continue to serve at the direction of the President; BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the associated Officers Committee for the role be likewise renamed. Special Order 7G, Rename Conference Planning VP and committee to Events Planning, was Tabled. AI: Ross discuss future of Concom with VP Concom and Comdev PMC.
Small Events ------------ A BarCamp was held in Bangalore a few weekends ago, which was largely a success, especially considering it was our first event in India. It is hoped that more events will happen in the area in future, and that other organisers can learn from what went well, and less well Planning continues for a number of US events for later in the year. An email was sent out to all committers about upcoming BarCamps, from which a few new volunteers for planned events have been found Spare mentor capacity exists for when any of these events feel they have reached the point of needing it. It seems to be generally felt that the current documentation is holding back potential small event organisers from reaching the point of requesting mentors, and means extra mentor work for those rare few who do get there. In addition, an emphasis on finding supplies and sponsorship for the first event in an area/of a type has been identified as putting a lot of people off. Because of this, the budget proposal for this coming year is a little different to in the past, as we hope to make it easier for the first event of a type/location to occur. (The hurdle is the first one). In addition, we are planning a mixed in-person + online weekend to try to turn the current incomplete "event in a box" documentation on the wiki into a finalised and ready-to-use set of instructions on our website. We hope this all combined will lead to many more small events occurring ApacheCons ---------- A number of ACNA sponsors were incorrectly given the full attendee list, due to a mixup at The Open Bastion, which lead to a number of emails going out to attendees. TOB believe all sponsors have now got rid of the list and won't use it going forward. TOB have implemented tweaks to prevent this occurring again, and intend to send out an apology soon. Final numbers have yet to be produced for ACNA, but are expected soon. Very little feedback has been received on the discussions + minutes on the future of ApacheCon meeting from Portland. The plan will therefore be to produce a new RFP for a producer for Europe, building on the experiences of ACEU12+ACNA13, hopefully over the next few weeks, and work with TOB on a future ACNA. Committee --------- Several years after first suggested by the board, we are planning to massively cull the number of lists we have. A plan for what goes where has been discussed by the committee and approved. We intend to document the new structure and ask Infra to make the required changes soon A special order has been submitted to the board to rename the VP position and associated committee, to better match what the roles are (and aren't!) covered by them. Following discussions, several people who helped with ACEU12 and ACNA13 have been approached to see if they have the cycles+interest in joining the committee
Small Events ------------ We'll hopefully be announcing an event in Bangalore in a day or so. This will be a CloudStack heavy, but by no means exclusive one day BarCamp. The Boston BarCamp is gathering momentum, aimed for May. We have a good mix of new blood and old hands involved! DC and New York are expected to have events after Boston, hopefully sharing a great deal of experience and advice. There has also been some discussion from this around support for small events, both advice and physical stuff. The "Event In A Box" really needs some work to finish off and publish. In addition, people in other areas of the world expressed an interest in doing a small event at ApacheCon, but none of them have piped up on-list yet. Committee Structure ------------------- No new committee members have been added this month. There are possibly a few we should look at adding, once someone has a chance to compare the planners@ and apachecon-discuss@ posts in the run-up to ApacheCon with the committee list, and spot any we've missed... There has been a general consensus to move to just two lists. This may involve renaming the committee! Plans for naming the committee, naming the lists, and what goes where in the move are still open. Budget planning has just begun. ApacheCon NA 2013 ----------------- This was generally held to be a success. We didn't get quite as many people as we'd hoped, but we did have an engaged and interested group there. Final attendence was about 350, we'll be getting exact numbers and details fairly soon. Volunteer energy was used for community events, but very little for the main conference (and if anything people felt too little was used). Various community events around the conference were tried. Other than the post-event hackathons (which there was no interest in until 9am the day after the conference, when suddenly there was lots but it was too late!), events were ok to amazingly attended, and with sustainable volunteer needs to pull off. Local engagement wasn't as high as expected though, but ideas were found for fixing that going forward. A hackathon space during the conf on the same level was missed, and the difference between Sinsheim and Portland on this was noticable, so we now know one really is required. Future ApacheCons ----------------- A fairly long discussion was held after the conf, with notes taken and circulated. There hasn't yet been a lot of on-list review + discussions on this, which may mean people are busy focusing on small events, list re-org and video+audio. The meeting did reach two rough decisions, still awaiting list confirmation. One was that a producer led ACNA under TOB should be done for two more years, with only minor tweaks (to address a few issues), building on the knowledge that TOB have gained from Sinsheim and Portland. It was also felt that there should be another Europe event, but that it had to be producer led - not community (not) driven. That will need an updating of the ACNA RFP based on the lessons learnt, then a search for a suitable producer to make it happen.
Small Events ------------ It looks like there's a critical mass of organisers interested in an event in Bangalore in late March, especially around CloudStack and GSOC. Once a venue has been sourced, this can be announced. Depending on the venue, it might be a pure BarCamp, or a BarCamp with hackathon. Third Party Branding requests have come in from a few projects, and along with trademarks we've been advising Subversion about their hackathon. No other small events are on the horizon, and a few possible ones seem to have gone quiet lately. We may want to hunt out likely suspects at ApacheCon and try to persuade them to push ahead with smaller events in their local areas. Spare mentor capacity currently exists. Past ApacheCons --------------- The finances for several past ApacheCons have largely been documented and finalised this month. Figures for the last two NA ApacheCons have now gone into SVN, and we've worked with TAC and Operations to handle the ASF profits vs ASF TAC costs. The figures for ACEU have largely gone into SVN, we're waiting for one EUR payment to come in from NewThinking so we can finalise the USD accounts. ApacheCon NA ------------ ApacheCon NA 2013 is happening in Portland next week. There will be a BarCamp on the Sunday, Hackathon on the Monday, and community events in the evenings. Numbers are apparently looking lower than the last two NA ApacheCons. There also seems to be less community engagement with the event than the previous two NA events. Positively, the amount of volunteer energies going into the event are well down on the previous two NA events, much much lower than EU, and largely focused on the surrounding community events. Whether the lower community engagement is linked to the lower volunteer involvement or not is currently not clear. Future ApacheCon Discussion --------------------------- After Portland, no more ApacheCons are currently planned. Both Europe and this event (along with the producer model) were one-off experiments to try and find a future path for ApacheCon. A session (with note taking) is planned for the end of ACNA, to discuss how well the particular producer led approach worked, in terms of volunteer energies and community outcomes. This will then be taken back to the list, and shared especially with those with more experience of previous ApacheCons, but less involvement in this one. We then need to decide if a producer led ApacheCon under slightly different rules would work. (A pure community event has been shown not to work, but a low cost for committers and speakers event has been shown to, but may not be possible financially with a producer. Co-locating has been tried a few times now, and hasn't really seemed to work well. Berlin Buzzwords has worked amazingly well, but sadly not under our flag...) Committee --------- No new members this month. A few people are likely to be approached in Portland, to sound out their interest in joining
ApacheCon --------- Things seem to be progressing for ACNA, and volunteer energies needed at the moment are much much lower than in the past. Volunteers are mostly focused on the smaller community focused events around ApacheCon, such as the BarCamp, Hackathon and evening events. A call for participation in the community events was sent out before Christmas, and generated a spike of activity that has rather subsided. Hopefully engagement and interest will pick up again as the event gets closer, as not all of these surrounding events are fully planned yet. There has been some discussion around communications of committer discounts, what speakers need to do, the pmc engagement in the talk selection etc. Some of this seems just to be people not reading their emails, which we can't really help. Some others seem to stem from the producer not fully understanding the differences in communities that would be in Portland than Sinsheim, despite advice. This can hopefully be put down to their learning about the ASF, and hopefully didn't have too much impact. Finances for ACEU12 are being finalised, and it looks like there was a small profit as expected, which is provisionally going towards community events/support at ACNA13. Finances for ACUS 09-11 have now come in, and we're working with TAC and the Treasurer on these. (They contain concom and tac merged) A discussion on the next ApacheCons is provisionally planned for the tail end of Portland (see apachecon-discuss@ for scope and involvement) Small Events ------------ Other than small events around ACNA, there are currently no small events known to be in planning with ConCom support / needing ConCom support. There's probably not many spare volunteer cycles to help with others though, as we're hoping to do quite a lot of community events around ACNA. Committee --------- Following clarification of how we add new committee members in the new committee setup, three new volunteers were invited. Two confirmed they still wanted to join, and we're pleased to welcome Justin Mclean <jmclean> and Donald Harbison <dpharbison>
Committee --------- We are *STILL* waiting for confirmation of the process to add new members to the committee under the new structure. Could someone please confirm what that is? Only we have several new people we'd like to add, in if only we knew how.... ApacheCon NA ------------ All speakers have now been notified, only slightly late, announcements have gone out (thanks Sally!), and a full conference schedule should be published any minute now. Committers heavily discounted tickets are still available, until the 31st, and a reminder will be sent out soon. Speakers have been notified of the different registration options (company supported for credit, free reg, free reg + shared hotel), which will hopefully allow all speakers to attend. TAC kindly delayed the deadline to allow confirmed speakers to apply for help, so hopefully speakers for whom travel costs were an issue will also be supported. We're planning on having a BarCamp on the Sunday before, hackathon on the Monday, community events in the evenings, and project-specific hackathons after. Emails about this are being drafted, and wiki pages created, emails to pmcs about getting involved should be out soon. ApacheCon Europe ---------------- Our main contact at NewThinking has been unavailable for a few weeks, but we're expecting the final accounting to be sorted fairly soon once they're back. Plans for future events are largely on-hold until after ACNA, as we want to review how the RFP + producer led event works before deciding on anything. Everyone is clear though on not doing another one of the same format! Other Events ------------ There was a meetup in Sydney last week to discuss a future BarCamp there. Current thinking is that the Apache part of BarCampApacheSydney is problematic for the local tech community (causes more confusion than the advantages of the brand), so it's expected to be an Apache-heavy but non-branded BarCamp. Provisional plan is for the Australian winter. We haven't heard any more from anyone interested in running any of the other small events that were discussed at ACEU. We'll probably try a push to get some people interested in the new year, along with some info when we contact committers about getting involved in ACNA. The third Apache Asia Roadshow was held a few days ago, no report has been received from them yet but we're hoping to include that in the January report. The process of approving third party events has been clarified, and the documentation tweaked. Hopefully now that everyone knows that anyone on the committee can take on the role of initial review + shepherding, we'll have fewer problems with dropped balls.
ApacheCon Europe ---------------- A full report on the conference was sent last week. The short summary is that it was a success, sold out, but not the type of conference that was originally planned, and the model shouldn't be repeated. We believe we made a small profit on the event, the exact amount should be clear soon when we finish sorting out the various small last minute expenses. NewThinking are still waiting on a number of sponsors to pay, a balancing credit should come from them once that is completed. Slides were captured from almost all sessions, and Nour is leading the process to get them online and tagged/associated with sessions. Most sessions were audio recorded, and another group of volunteers are editing those for eventual posting to FeatherCast. We're working out a plan with Infra to host the raw videos (one out of each six sessions) and get them edited. ApacheCon North America ----------------------- ACNA is taking place in Portland in late Feb, being organised by Open Bastion, following the RFP in the spring. It should involve significantly lower ASF energies than both ACEU and past ACNAs did, and the producer seems well aware of our desire to avoid the past problems. PMCs have been asked to help review content from the CFP, and quite a few people have kindly agreed to help with this. We are hoping to approach a few people to provide sign-posting services for TOB to help them get queries answered by appropriate bits of the ASF. Most of the available volunteer energies will be directed to organising community events before / during / after. The current outline plan for community events around the conference are: * Sunday - open barcamp, needs website + venue + locals + maybe sponsors? * Monday - hackathon, needs wiki * Tue - Thurs - events 5-7pm + evening, such as barcamp / lightning talks in hackathon / food space * Fri/Sat - project events, needs wiki + projects to sign up We'll need to start planning these community events fairly soon, though much of the organising won't be needed yet. There was a lot of discussion at ACEU about the level of support needed to have a strong community event around ApacheCons. Part of this was felt to be a lot of support for those speakers who need it, to allow for a wide range of different communities and speakers to attend, and part of it was cheap committer tickets for those committers who won't attend many talks (most committers at ACEU talked and hacked). However, it was known during the RFP that the current ApacheCon attendee numbers can't support this level of committer+speaker support. We have agreed to a capped amount of underwriting for this support with the producer, to allow the discounted committer tickets to go on sale, and speakers be offered free tickets if they need it. If ACNA is a success, very little ConCom money will be needed (but a small amount will be). We can then evaluate how well that amount of support works before the next one, which will hopefully be bigger and better able to support the committers and speakers from attendee registrations. New People ---------- We're still waiting to hear back from operations@ on the process to add new committee members with the new structure. Several people who helped out with ACEU have agreed to help join. Once we receive the information on the process for adding new committee members, we'll start the ball rolling to bring the fresh blood in! Other Events ------------ Following discussions at ApacheCon, it looks like there are a number of possible future barcamps: * Sydney * Bangalore * New York * Paris Those who expressed interests in helping with these have been encouraged to join the small-events-discuss list and ask for help/advice there. Hopefully at least some of these possible events will go ahead over the coming months! Another Apache Asia Roadshow is being planned for December 13th in Beijing, with organisers from last year augmented by a few new volunteers. The date was chosen to dovetail in with the Cloud Computing Summing in Beijing. Currently, no funds look to be needed to support the event due to contributions from local sponsors.
A report was expected, but not received
----------------- ApacheCons ---------- The website for ApacheCon NA 2013 is set to go live early this week, and the Call For Papers will launch shortly after that. This is slightly later than planned, but it was felt best to delay things until after the ACEU notifications and schedules were done. ACEU continues to trial various processes, website features, ideas etc for ACNA, with varying levels of pain/success. While this has caused some notable delays to ACEU things this month, it has led to a lot of bugs getting fixed / processes getting refined, which should hopefully make life much slicker and easier for ACNA (expected to be a much larger event) Notifications to Speakers, Backup Speakers and rejections have been sent out, and almost all responses received. A few speakers have declined, and will shortly be replaced by the designated backup speakers, with remaining backup speakers likely to be called upon nearer the time. The allocations of sessions to tracks were worked out a few weeks ago, and used as the basis for track chairs to select the talks they wanted to include. Now that speaker responses are in, the Schedule for ACEU is set to be announced early this week. Following last month's board feedback, we have opted to make the ACEU event more focused on the community, and trimmed back a few aspects to reduce the amount of volunteer energies required. As part of this, we intend to dramatically lower the committers ticket price, to try to draw more committers along. Details on this are expected to be announced this week. We've also gained sponsorship to offer heavily discounted student tickets, and a volunteer has kindly put together a flyer advertising this. Speakers will be offered a free ticket if they need it. A few speakers are helping revise the draft speaker information, and we expect to send this out a few days after the schedule. Melissa is doing a great job in maintaining the task schedule and todo list, which is helping reduce (but sadly not eliminate...) the number of dropped balls and late task completions. Small Events ------------ No new small events are currently scheduled, or in the planning stages. There is limited volunteer cycles available to help mentor if volunteers interested in organising an event were to surface. There's not currently the cycles available to seek out and encourage new people, but there is hope that ACEU may cause some to show up. Committee --------- No new committee members were added this month, though 3 were added last month. ACEU has a number of volunteers who hadn't been widely involved in ConCom before, several of whom may be good candidates for committee membership in the near future. There have been some discussions on the number of lists that ConCom manages. A few people have suggested reducing it to simply two lists, but some potential snags with this approach have been identified and not yet resolved. This discussion is expected to continue, and we hope that the recent list of requirements and background on where the more recent lists have come from, may allow someone to come up with a new plan which solves most of the problems. Progress with the long term TODO list has been virtually non-existent, with admin/website/etc energies currently focused on ApacheCon instead.
Small Events ------------ There are no small events currently on the cards, and none being talked about. There is some spare cycles available to mentor new organisers if some were to surface and declare an interest. There probably aren't the cycles at the moment to do outreach though to try to generate new interest. Third Party Events & Policy --------------------------- Requests for third party event branding approval continue to come in, sometimes in advance, sometimes at a later stage... We've also been working a bit with some Podlings around project branded giveaways, tshirts and the like. Much of this has been solved with mentor hats on. There has been some discussions around logos for events, but no conclusion yet on exactly where the responsibilities lie between ConCom and Trademarks for this. A final policy on targeted donations has been drawn up, based on the board's original recommendations, feedback from ConCom, and the OK of Fundraising. It awaits promotion to its new home on events.apache.org, along with some other things, but ApacheCon tasks have got in the way of doing this. Committee --------- A good month for new blood! We've voted in Jim Jagielski, Matt Franklin, Mohammad Nour El-Din and Tim Williams. We've also discussed a few other possible people, and re-introduced the policy to hold PMC membership votes on concom-private now that we're opening ConCom up to all interested committers. ApacheCon --------- Most ApacheCon things are being covered in the (at least) weekly reports to the president. A few brief bits are mentioned here. For ApacheCon North America, the contract with OpenBastion has been signed, a holding page with key details has gone up, and Sally + OpenBastion have worked on announcements / press releases. OpenBastion are working on the timeline, sponsorship prospectus etc at the moment. The CFP is set to open on Monday 3rd September, so more activities and the final website are expected in the coming weeks. OpenBastion are also helping with ACEU, which is allowing them to try out ideas in advance and see which ones work / don't work. This will hopefully lead to a better ACNA! For ApacheCon Europe, the (extended) CFP is set to close in a few hours, and we currently have an excellent 226 proposals submitted. The planners list has been setup, with all track chairs (amongst others) subscribed, and reviewing is in progress. We have hit some teething problems with the new site (which will also be used for ACNA), so the selection process does risk slipping a little bit. Currently, the plan is for accepted / rejected / backup talk notifications to go out on Monday. Ticket sales for ACEU were set to open last Monday, and ticket prices were finalised based on the quote for production assistance. Unfortunately, assumptions about EU VAT status turned out just to be that, and the planned process for ticket sales + sponsorship collection fell through. Daily calls are in place to work on this issue (and a few other critical ones), and we hope to have something in place to allow us to start accepting payments late this week, in a way where we'll be able to claim VAT back from the venue / food / etc bills. Melissa and Steve are currently working on a timeline and key dates. When that is in place, it should be easier for people who aren't following all of apachecon-discuss, concom, concom-private and planners to work out what tasks need doing, and which ones they might have the cycles to help with. (Previous ways of asking for volunteers have met with mixed success) The two different ways of doing ApacheCon continues to be a learning experience (one with a sponsored venue, one with a traditional producer and hotel). We have very clearly learnt not to try another conference on the model of ACEU, no matter how many people suggest beforehand that it'd be a great idea... We shall see in 6 months time how well the "give the producer most of the control and responsibilities" option works out as an alternate model!
Ross: Things are happening very quickly and there are still many things up in the air. There are volunteers but they cannot do everything that needs to be done. Jim: There is a lack of documentation (master plan) detailing everything that needs to be done. This should be a separate task for the organizer. Nick: Most everything is now planned to be done by the organizer, executive assistant, or track chairs. Ross: Recommend a very short time line for the organization task to be completed. Noirin: Need to balance the experience of the old guard concom with the enthusiasm of the new folks. Concerned about the short time left to promote the conference and get sponsors and attendees. Doug: There are risks to Apache if we continue and have a failed conference. But the board is not going to step in now and tell concom what to do. Nick: All contracts are either checked into svn or on the concom list.
Small Events ------------ A number of projects held events at OSCON last week, which from the feedback received so far were well received. We'll hopefully have more for next month on this. Thanks to all those who were involved in running the various parts of it! There are currently no known cross-project small events in the planning stages, and none on the horizon either. We hope that activity will pick up later in the summer. A number of project specific events are in progress, but these haven't required much in the way of ConCom support (though it has been offered). There have been a few queries recently about branding / logos / giveaways for smaller events that don't have direct ConCom involvement, such as small project events and project booths at conferences. It's not currently clear where the responsibilities lie between Trademarks and ConCom for this sort of thing. We have proposed something to clarify this, we're waiting to hear back from Trademarks on it. A draft policy on direct sponsorship for small events has been drawn up, based on the feedback from the board, fundraising and discussions on the mailing list. It's expect we'll vote on this fairly soon, and once approved will be posted on events.apache.org (hopefully along with some of the surrounding advice for event organisers) ApacheCon North America ----------------------- OpenBastion signed the contract with the hotel in Portland for the 24th February - 2nd March 2013, with the main conference 26th-28th February. Steve from OpenBastion has worked with Sally to get an announcement out about this. Nick and Steve have worked to put up basic details on all the likely websites, and a holding page with key details is available on the final site, http://na.apachecon.com/. A full site is expected over the next month, and the CFP is set to open on the 3rd of September. The proposed contract with OpenBastion has been tweaked following feedback from a number of committee members, and the legal committee. Assuming no unexpected snags, we expect to sign the final version this week. In the mean time, OpenBastion continue to work on the contract, and engage with the community. ApacheCon Europe ---------------- The Call For Papers opened last week, and was announced along with the website by Sally and at OSCON. The CFP is currently set to end on the 3rd of August, but may be extended if we feel there's need, and if we feel we can compress the review/selection progress. The aim is currently to have the sessions chosen+announced by mid August, and the final schedule published shortly after. Details of the reviewing process, both for track chairs and for interested volunteers, should be available within a week. (We're awaiting confirmation from Eldarion of the exact process, but it expected to be very similar to the PyCon one) A site visit is planned for this Thursday, 27th July. A number of questions have been put together which are to be answered during this visit. Amongst this will be confirmation of details around the venue layout and rooms, which will allow finalising of the tracks, and the catering, which is needed to finalise the ticket costs. The aim is for early bird ticket sales to being on Monday 6th August. There are a number of gaps in the budget spreadsheet which need to be filled in before the ticket prices can be finalised, but it is expected that the missing details for this will be found during/just after the site visit. (The prices are needed a few days in advance of this, so they can be fed into the website and the ticketing system) At the moment, the bulk of the discussions and planning remains on the public apachecon-discuss list. An attempt is being made to keep things public and open for as long as possible, but it's anticipated that a private planners list will be needed fairly soon. Each proposed track nominated one or two track chairs, who will make up much of the planners list, along with ConCom volunteers, OpenBastion and the EA. Sally has come up with an interesting plan for sponsorship, which promises to be simple, easy to organise/arrange, and feed well into potential joint ACEU/ACNA sponsorship. This would have the advantage of not needing such a large sponsor co-ordinator volunteer, who thus far hasn't been found. (ACNA sponsorship responsibility lies with the producer, so needs confirming with them before it could be announced) The plan is for OpenBastion to take on many of the supporting/organising roles for the event, supported by volunteers and the EA where appropriate / available. This should provide a chance to try out ideas before ACNA, for OpenBastion to learn more about the community, as well as to minimise dropped balls / problems / etc. A contract for this is expected shortly after the ACNA one, but it is intended that they'll be looking after the website, registration/ticketing, publicity, on-site, and helping with sponsorship and speaker admin. After the site visit, and with the OpenBastion contract, it is expected that all of "Sally's Questions" on the event will be fully answered. (Many of the questions are already answered, or partially answered pending these details). Over the next month, the key tasks to be completed (by a mixture of volunteers, OpenBastion and Melissa) are: * Site Visit, get answers to lots of outstanding questions * Finish budget, finalise ticket prices * Open ticket sales * Review submissions, select talks * Draft schedule * Finalise sponsorship plan, follow up on existing leads Committee --------- Jim Jagielski has expressed an interest in getting more involved in ConCom, and a vote is underway. Matt Franklin is a new volunteer this month, helping out with OSCON, we hope he enjoyed the experience enough to stick around for future events!
ACEU activities are now progressing apace, but perhaps not fast enough to make it a success. The assignment of OpenBastion for some ACEU tasks appears to be a surprise for many folks. The board needs more insight into the production of ACEU. Perhaps weekly reports and request Nick's attendance at the next board meeting. Surprisingly, OpenBastion has apparently signed a hotel contract but no contract with ASF. Need to have more dialog on the concom list instead of private discussion.
Small Events ------------ The DC BarCamp was held towards the end of May, and was our first small event in the region. Attendance was lighter than expected, possibly not helped by the stunning weather that weekend. However, everyone who came was very engaged, and the event was very productive with lots of excellent sessions. One thing that came out of the DC BarCamp was that those who hadn't been to a BarCamp before didn't know enough about how good the event would be in advance, so struggled to encourage others to attend. All those in the future events session felt this BarCamp had been excellent, and they wished they'd known in advance how good it would be so they could have persuaded more people to come along. It seems we need to provide more general information for potential attendees of any Apache BarCamp, including hopefully some interviews with past attendees. There was a lot of enthusiasm for this idea, and several volunteers to help with the content and interviews, so hopefully we'll see something come out of this in the coming months. The 2nd Spanish Apache BarCamp is believed to be progressing with planning. No other small events are currently known to be in progress. There should be spare mentor cycles ready for future events, especially into the autumn, for when people express an interest in starting an event. We have received the feedback from the board around targeted donations for small events. There was some concern that the proposed rules might be too strict, but not universally. We can hopefully finalise things before the next meeting, and post some information on the events.apache.org site about both the targeted donations rules, and sponsorship information for organisers generally. General ------- The Committee TODO List continues to have quite a few items on it. The high priority things are generally getting done, but at the expense of lower priority items such as tidying up organisers documentation and moving it to the new site. After a somewhat worrying pause, new volunteer energy has been found for the Apache space at OSCON. Projects who submitted ideas for sessions on the Monday and Tuesday will hopefully be contacted shortly to confirm things, and start getting the word out. It looks like we have quite a few volunteers to help with things on the ground, and thanks to new blood also hopefully enough organising energies in advance. ApacheCon Europe ---------------- Discussions, ideas and volunteer energy continues on the public apachecon-discuss list. People are gaining experience in what sort of calls to action work out best, after the odd false start. Work has begun by volunteers to put together information on the local area of the venue, such as where people can look at staying, where to go in the evenings for food/drinks etc. After some discussions, it has been decided to finalise the track list before the CFP opens, to hopefully avoid some issues which have affected past ApacheCon CFPs. Several track suggestions were received on the public list, and these are now being formally collated. All PMCs have now been asked to submit their ideas for tracks, ideally often in conjunction with other related projects, and IPMC mentors have been asked to include their podlings as appropriate. Based on this, we can hopefully open the CFP in early July. Assuming no snags, if we hit the CFP opening in early July we will be a few weeks behind the ideal schedule, but hopefully not disastrously late. Once the CFP is open, we can then concentrate on things like the website, finalising ticket details etc. We are looking at bringing OpenBastion in to help with some of the tasks that volunteers tend not to enjoy / tend not to fit well with variable volunteer energy. This offers the chance for OpenBastion to learn how we work, try out ideas for ApacheCon North America in advance etc. Once the ACNA contract is sorted, we will decide on this and sort out a contract with an appropriate party. In the mean time, OpenBastion are kindly helping out already. ApacheCon North America ----------------------- A draft contract has been received, and no major objections spotted. The draft contract is missing a few bits, once we have the a version with these present we will forward it to legal for review. The producer expects to be able to announce the final dates shortly, but the last week in Feb is looking very likely barring unexpected issues. Sally is in the loop on this, and we can hopefully do an announcement jointly for the ApacheCon NA dates and the ApacheCon EU CFP + dates reminder. Volunteers interested in ApacheCon NA are being encouraged to get involved (often remotely) in ACEU, to try out ideas, see what works (and what doesn't), help new people come up to speed on the communities etc. This seems to be largely working, at least so far, and is helping to shape the plans for ACNA.
There are concerns about ApacheCon EU.
Small Events ------------ The DC BarCamp is this coming weekend, and everything looks on track for this. We'll be able to give a report next month, along with hopefully some idea of how (if at all) it could help grow more east coast events. The DC BarCamp has raised some questions around how sponsorship for small events is collected and bills paid. Specifically, for an event that have money contributed rather than having sponsors pay for specific line items directly, and for when there is either no local company available to take in sponsorship money or where the sponsors would rather not send it to a very small company. I believe Greg will be raising this for discussion. In case it helps, general thoughts on small event sponsorship styles are at: <http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-small-events-discuss/201202.mb ox/%3C4F3A3CAB.9050100@apache.org%3E> There was a local meetup (cross project) in the Netherlands, which seemed to go well. Hopefully there will be more of these. We wish them luck, and encourage other areas with a high density of committers to think about it too. An announcement to PMCs about getting involved in OSCON has been sent out. We'll reach out to committers in a little bit (pitching the same thing, but in a slightly different way). We aim to get projects signed up to use the space on the Monday and Tuesday, for things like introductory hackathons and talks, along with perhaps some detailed hackathons before/after. Projects and Committers intersted should fill out the survey at <http://s.apache.org/OSCON12> to let us know. ApacheCon --------- The vote on the ApacheCon NA 2013 RFP concluded, and the OpenBastion proposal was accepted. OpenBastion have circulated a list of possible dates to the apachecon-discuss list for review, and we expect that they'll confirm the dates (roughly Feb 2013, perhaps give or take a week) soon. They're currently drawing up a contract, which we'll review (with help from legal) later this month. In addition to ApacheCon NA 2013, we'll also be having an ApacheCon Europe in late 2012. We now have a confirmed venue booking at the SAP supported venue, the Rhein-Neckar-Arena in Sinsheim. SAP have kindly agreed to sponsor us for the venue hire (including tech and staff), as well as some money towards catering. (We'll be looking to other sponsors too though, it's not an exclusive sponsorship deal). Discussions on the format of the event (how many one day vs multiday tracks, small vs big tracks etc) are underway on the apachecon-discuss list. We encourage anyone interested in either event to join the list and get involved! We expect to have more details on both events sorted in the coming month, and possibly also some basic website details. For now, the apachecon homepage has been updated to offer some simple information, thanks to infra for making the vhost and dns tweaks for this.
Late, short report, apologies from Nick for this. Small Events ------------ There have been discussions about the 2nd BarCamp Apache in Spain, targeted for late September. There was some debate about the idea of charging a small ticket fee, which was largely resolved as being OK if the local conditions meant it was needed. We hope that the experiences from this event can better inform future organisers on the pluses and minuses of a small fee. Otherwise, we all look forward to a good BarCamp! Some committers in the Netherlands have decided to start organising small local evening events on a ~monthly basis, in a somewhat similar way to the existing Berlin get-togethers. We wish them luck, and encourage other areas with a high density of committers to think about it too. The OSCON schedule has been announced, with Apache talks included. We intend to reach out to projects soon (especially those projects with talks, but not only) about hackathons and talks on the Monday and Tuesday before, when we have space. We'll also ask about helping on the booth, and possible Apache crash space. Planning for the DC BarCamp in about a month is proceeding well. General ------- We've setup a TOOD list, for non-immediate admin/organising tasks at <http://wiki.apache.org/concom-planning/ConComTODO>. We've been less good about completing them though... ApacheCon --------- For ApacheCon NA, a series of questions and concerns were put to the single RFP bidder, based on discussions and feedback from the RFP proposal. We've had the answers back from these, discussed them a bit more, and we think we're close to being ready to hold a vote. If that passes, we'll still need to work out a contract, for which we may well reach out to some likely suspects for advice. Thanks to the information from Sam, we now know how to get the legal checks we need for it too.
Small Events ------------ A "BarCamp" was held over two days in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at the end of February. There was a lot more interest than expected, with numbers limited to 200 on the first day, 100 on the 2nd. The large numbers meant the format of the event was changed last minute, to more Roadshow style one. This had a mixed effect, which was discussed with the organisers by Nick and Ross. Everyone who attended seemed to find it interesting and useful, and there was a lot of energy, especially on the 1st day (lots of students / recent graduates). We hope to see more events, big and small from these organisers in the future. Work on the DC BarCamp for May is continuing nicely. Lots of good questions are being asked on the organisers list, some of which have been re-posted in a general form to the small events discuss list. After the event, it may make sense to collect up some more of these to share. Signup and the website will go live shortly. There was some discussion on a http related hackathon, with two proposals floated. This has gone back to the relevant PMCs for more discussion. No other possible small events are known about, but we may well try to tag another call-to-action for local events on with one of the bigger announcements, to see if that helps. Logos for small events are now on the new site (see below), which should hopefully make it easier for people to find and create their small event logos. We've also helped with the foundation site logos section. We need to make a push on the events at OSCON this coming month. Third Party Events ------------------ We reached out to Lucid about Lucene Revolution, and worked with them to tweak things to match the TPEBP, and they're now approved. CamelOne was approved recently under the TPEBP, after lots of hard work by a number of people, from ConCom and the PMC. Based on the CamelOne experience, it seems like a few small changes to the Third Party Event Branding Policy (TPEBP) are warranted, we'll look at these this month. ApacheCon --------- The RFP for ApacheCon NA has closed, and one response was received. We're in the process of drawing up a list of questions and concerns, which we'll put to the proposer, and we'll vote once we have their responses. If we do accept, we'll need some legal help with the contract. We would appreciate advice on the correct procedure to go about getting this? (A decision on the first phase of ACEU12 approval is in progress, we'll aim to update this before the board report with the outcome) Budget ------ The committee has discussed the budget requirements for the upcoming year. We're awaiting feedback on one point before submitting. Committee --------- No new committee members this month. After only 13 years, we have finally decided to have our own website! http://events.apache.org/ has been setup to provide a single location for our policies and information, as well as a canonical URL (+site if needed) for events. Some things have been moved over already, others still need to follow (and our information is widely spread...). We aim to tackle most of the migrations in the next week or so. The ApacheCon and events.apache.org related tasks have used all available admin energy this month, so no progress was made on committee structure.
AI Sam follow up with specific advice on how to get legal help
Small Events ------------ There will be a two day BarCamp in Colombo, Sri Lanka on the 26th and 27th Feb. Nick and Ross are offering mentoring, and will be speaking. TrafficServer and HTTPD are interested in a hackathon/meetup, we've answered their initial questions on how it works and what support is available, we expect to hear more from them soon. Tim Williams is continuing with the planning for a BarCamp in DC We've done some work on the wiki pages which describe the support available and steps needed for small events, based on the feedback from the above two events, but we know more work is needed on them. Third Party Events ------------------ We've OK'd an HBase event for May, a Cassandra Europe one for late March, and Hadoop Summit for June. A request was received for a Camel event, but we've asked for some clarifications / tweaks to better fit the current policy, and solve some PMC raised issues. In future though, for this sort of thing, we'll aim for ConCom to raise the problems, rather than the PMC. The Camel conference has highlighted a couple of areas of the policy that might want tweaking, we'll aim to review+vote on those this coming month. The CFP for OSCON closed, but due to mailing list moderation problems the reminder email from Sally was delayed until after the deadline. We'll reach out to PMCs about events on the Monday and Tuesday, and in the evenings nearer the time. Noirin is looking into possible crash+hack space for us, with a view to providing somewhere cheap to stay for Apache committers without company funding who wish to attend. ApacheCon --------- The ApacheCon NA RFP opened on the 23rd of January, and runs for 45 days, until the 8th of March. So far, a few of the producers who had expressed interest have declined, but we believe the remainder are still interested and are working on their bids. Discussions on the Europe event continue, and we hope to be able to announce something shortly. The aim is to announce the date, and invite those interested in helping to sign up to the planners list, just as soon as the venue booking is confirmed. Committee --------- No new committee members this month.
General ------- Our announcement about the OSCON CFP was thwarted by the message not being moderated through in time. (Everyone on concom@ got the cc'd copy, which is one of the reasons why we didn't notice the problem in time...) This is a shame, but we think at least some Apache talks were submitted anyway. We have received a few third party event requests, all of which have seemed fine in theory, but all of which are awaiting a few more bits of information before approval can be granted. Small Events ------------ The planned Knocktree Retreat won't be going ahead, as there weren't enough people interested in attending on any of the weekends the venue is available. There was a feeling that a Retreat style event should be tried during the week, but the venue used in the past isn't able to support this. No suitable alternate venues have been found, and there doesn't seem that much volunteer energy to drive it (largely due to the failure to attract people for the planned weekend one) On a more positive note, a DC event is in the planning. ApacheCon --------- We're still waiting to hear back from SAP on which week in late 2012 we can have, and linked to that which exact conference centre + space we've got. (This is the process of turning our outline approval into a specific space on a specific date). Christmas seems to have got in the way of the approval process. A few areas of the RFP have generated lots of discussion, but we think we've now finished. We're hoping to open the RFP this week, once the new list to capture submissions is open and people are subscribed *Update 23rd Jan* The RFP has now opened Committee --------- No new committee members have been added this month, and there are not currently any in the pipeline. Planning for the future of the committee has taken a backseat to the RFP, but with any luck should be tackled this coming month
General ------- We've had fruitful discussions with O'Reilly about OSCON. On the speaker side, we will be running "virtual tracks", where we highlight and signpost Apache related talks within the overall schedule. We'll also be encouraging Apache committers to submit to the CFP (due in a week or two), to help drive Apache content at OSCON. Alongside this, we've been allocated a room on the Monday and Tuesday, in which we hope to run community events. The outline plan is a mixture of themed hackathons, fast feather style talks on new projects and longer talks on existing ones. We'll also hopefully do hackathons and community events alongside the main tracks, but likely offsite. Ross and Noirin in particular have agreed to help drive this, and we'll likely seek more volunteers + firm up the plan in the new year. Cloudera agreed to the changes recommended by legal-internal, and so we've signed the renewal MOU. The signed copy is in /foundation/Contracts/ The speed of getting bills paid is causing some surprise for people who have paid for conference related things (eg the Asia Roadshow or ApacheCon Recorders). We are hopeful that recent board@ discussions on other bills is a sign this is already in hand. Small Events ------------ We held our 2nd BarCampApache in Sydney on the 10th of December. Attendance was down on last year, but good sessions were had by those who did come. A very helpful brainstorming session on future events was held, and we hope this will lead to more small events, and a much bigger BarCamp next year. There have been discussions on a small-ish event in the DC area, provisionally planned for early next year. Venues are being investigated, and we expect a firm plan and a wider call for volunteers once the space is identified. Provisional planning has begun for another Irish retreat. Initial interest indicates there may not be enough people who can make another weekend event, so we may need to look at another venue (the one used in the past is only available on weekends). This has also spawned discussion on another round of outreach to PMCs and Committers around small event interest, which may well be used to influence the retreat planning. No other future small events are currently known about. ApacheCon --------- We're waiting to hear back from our potential host on which week in late 2012 we can have, and linked to that which exact conference centre + space we've got. (This is the process of turning our outline approval into a specific space on a specific date). Once that is all confirmed, we'll internally announce the details and ask for volunteers (previously self identified and others) to join the planners list and kick things off. Work on the RFP has continued since ApacheCon, and we think we're still on track to open the process in early January. At this time, we believe we have captured all the MUST and MUST NOT requirements we received from the board. (This is alongside the concom gathered requirements and areas for producer innovation). However, it's entirely possible that we've missed one of the board requirements, or mis-understood one. We'd therefore encourage board members to review the current draft, and give feedback if they feel we've missed anything. The draft is available in: https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/foundation/Events/RFP_2011 Committee --------- No new committee members have been added this month, and there are not currently any in the pipeline. Planning for the future of the committee has taken a backseat to the RFP and the Sydney BarCamp. Once the RFP is out, we hope to be able to produce a plan that supports volunteers interested in putting on smaller events, welcomes new ones, and avoids the impression of not welcome new people. (This will need to also support the required interactions with external third parties, which is currently mixed in with volunteer events)
General ------- Nick attended the second half of the in-person board meeting last week, and delivered a partial report there. There was lots of discussion, and quite a bit of concrete suggestion and guidance on the future of ApacheCon given. (More on this later) The board (and later concom discussions) encouraged ConCom to continue the work with external conferences, which was piloted with GotoCon. From this, Nick and Sally have a call on Friday with O'Reilly about possible collaborations at OSCON. Feedback was received from legal (via Larry) about the Cloudera MOU, and we've fed back to Cloudera to ask for a couple more tweaks. Also with this were some suggested wording tweaks to the Third Party event branding policy, which we've accepted and updated the policy with. We've also slightly tweaked the Third Party event branding policy to make it clearer that events must not only be vendor neutral, but also easily seen by everyone to be neutral. Small Events ------------ The BarCamp in Seville was briefly covered in the last report, but we now have more details. For those who didn't attend the lightning talk on it, the attendance was our highest yet for a BarCampApache, and can hopefully go higher in future. Nick and Ross held discussions with Carlos about what went well / what was hard about organising the event, and we're hoping that Carlos will be able to help improve the documentation and guidance for future events. The Apache Asia Roadshow was held this month, and was a big success. The organisers provided a report to members@ on the event. We held two BarCamps in Vancouver, one at the hotel on the Tuesday before the conference, and one externally on the Saturday after. The in-conference one was our best in-conference one yet, and it seems that the improvements suggested after last year (lunch, next door to the hackathon, announce in advance etc) worked well. BarCampApacheSydney has been announced, at ApacheCon and online, for Saturday 10th December. Nick, Brett, Ari and Kazu are driving forward with this. ApacheCon also produced lots of discussions on other future small events. We hope that this will translate into planning activity on the small events list, and hopefully we'll be able to announce several new events in the next month. ApacheCon NA 11 --------------- The producer is on holiday this week, so we don't yet have final numbers for attendees. We hope to be able to provide that, along with outline figures next month. Rough numbers are expected to be about the 450 mark. Meetups, lightning talks and the hackathon all seemed well attended, though the meetups generally seemed to be conference attendees only. The conference seemed to go well, especially thanks to the efforts of Sally, the planners, the speakers and the TAC reps. Speaker and Planner hotels/expenses/etc seemed to work much better this time, anyone with any outstanding issues around hotel costs or reg fees should contact the planners list. Cliff and Rich did a stunning job with getting recorders, working with TAC to record sessions, and posting the audio online. We hope this will help with educating and expanding the community, through easier access to and use of the conference materials by those not present. The 5 recorders purchased have been distributed based on expected upcoming events. 2 are with Melissa ready to post to the next NA event, 1 is with Nick in Europe, and 2 with Brett ready for BarCampApacheSydney. We expect to bring these two back to Europe afterwards, ready for small events in the spring. Slides and Audio have been posted to Lanyrd, and we've asked speakers to review/check/correct these. At some point soon, volunteers (probably Nick...) will archive the current ApacheCon site, so we have a record for posterity. The Future of ApacheCon ----------------------- This was debated at length before and during the conference. Following discussions and feedback from the board, a session was held on the Tuesday evening to discuss the plans and the RFP. During these discussions, a large number of requirements from past events were agreed as being "up for grabs". The conclusions were generally that we should focus our requirements on a few key areas, and leave the bulk of things up to the producer (decisions as well as responsibilities). Once the remaining key areas were agreed, this led to a initial drafting process, led largely by Issac, Danese and Cliff, with input from both those at the event and those remote. The draft document still needs some more work, but we would encourage those board members who haven't already offered feedback to do so now. The plan is for the RFP draft to be worked on over the coming month, with Nick responsible for nailing down the final form in that time. We hope to present the final version at the December board meeting for approval. Our intention is to then make any last tweaks (if required by the board), wait out the Christmas period, and then start the CFP just into the new year. Work has also begun on an internal, ASF private document to capture the review and approval process that'll be used to judge submissions. An outline announcement for ApacheCon EU 2012 was made at ApacheCon, along with the plan to have the next ApacheCon NA in 2013. A pleasing number of people volunteered to help with ACEU. Nick is in discussions with Paul Gotez (Apache Committer, and main on the ground SAP contact) on finalising the venue and dates for ACEU12. Once those are confirmed, we'll seek to sign up volunteers to help with the planning and organising, as well as confirm what additional support we'll need (beyond that provided by the SAP facilities/events team) Committee --------- The structure of the committee was discussed with the board, along with at other events. Several people who have previously organised small events were asked about joining the committee, but the bulk declined, typically citing the history (or "baggage") of concom as a reason. Following board feedback and advice, it's intended to provide something for the December board meeting to tackle this.
Report deferred as it was not received in time for adequate review.
General ------- We held an Apache track at GotoCon in Amsterdam last week, as an experiment in colocating with an event to deliver entry level material and outreach. This seemed to work quite well, both from an organising and speaking perspective, and from a "getting the word out about Apache and our projects" one. At a suitable conference, this would seem worth trying again in the future. We expect to do some work with ComDev at ApacheCon to help reduce the amount of volunteer effort required to let this sort of event happen, which may make it easier to do. (It's not a suitable replacement for ApacheCon though) We've had an initial request from Cloudera to renew their MOU for use of the Hadoop mark for conferences. A problem was spotted, and they've gone off to update one clause. We expect to be asking legal for a review of the new one shortly. Otherwise on the third party event branding front, we're currently reviewing two applications, and considering a slight wording tweak. Small Events ------------ A hackathon was held on in Amsterdam last weekend, after GotoCon. The Rave project had got heavily behind this, and found the event very very useful. No other projects had pushed it, so committers from other projects that attended mostly just ended up learning about and working on Rave! It showed that getting one or two "seed" projects involved in these local hackathons is important to making them a success - simply having enough local committers isn't enough on its own. ConCom is grateful to Trifork, the GotoCon organisers, for supplying the room and a lovely lunch! The BarCamp in Serville was the week before, and went well. Things are on track for the Apache Asia Roadshow in Shanghai in a week's time. The budget has come in lower than originally requested, which is good, and signup numbers are looking excellent. After a worrying period of silence, things are moving quickly with the post-ApacheCon BarCampApacheVancouver. A venue has been found, the local organisers are active, key people have been invited, and we hope to formally announce shortly. The possible 2nd BarCampApacheSydney had been stalling for lack of a good venue (despite lots of investigations by the local organiser Kazuyuki Kono). Thanks to a fortuitous beer at GotoCon however, we think we may now have a sponsored venue in the city. If this pans out, we could be ready to kick off organising and announcements in earnest in a week or so. No other BarCamps are currently planned. ApacheCon NA 11 --------------- ApacheCon in Vancouver is approaching worryingly rapidly. Registration figures are looking good (but not amazing) compared to previous years. Otherwise, things are progressing in an OK fashion, but at a much much higher level of volunteer energy than should be being required. The number of things being dropped by the producer is worryingly high. Sally and the planners are either doing these, or poking the producer until they are done (whichever is easier), but it is only our shared desire for an excellent conference that is making us take on this extra work. The only silver lining is that it's giving us plenty of things to ensure are done better by a planner at any future ApacheCon.... Several projects have signed up for meetups, but there is space for more! ConCom is immensely grateful to Sally for all the work she is putting in on ApacheCon. Future ApacheCons ----------------- The discussions on the future of ApacheCon have started, but not gone very far owing to Vancouver taking most people's time. We expect to have lots of useful discussions in Vancouver, and we hope this will then feed into fruitful debate and discovery on the mailing list. Nick and Sally intend to raise the proposed outline plans at the board F2F in Vancouver, doubtless to the delight of everyone... Committee --------- No changes this month. A number of committers and members have privately expressed interest in helping with a future ApacheCon in Germany at SAP. Assuming we get the board nod, and approve a plan, this is likely to result in bringing these people (and others) onto the committee as well as that event's planners list.
General ------- An anti harassment policy for concom organised events was approved and published. The producers approved a proposed policy for ApacheCon (which was similar but not the same), and this has now been published. Progress on the 2nd version of the policy to cover additional forms of harassment (the policy concentrates most on the problems we know we have had, but not all kinds) has stalled. A champion to drive this is probably needed. A one day Apache track (with 5 Apache selected and related talks) will take place at GotoCon in Amsterdam in about a month. We'll review how well Apache organised tracks, aiming more at users, co-located with external events work after this. We also have a 1 day hackathon afterwards, signup so far has been a little disappointing, so this will likely be a small event (though fun for those there!) We expect to approve the final proposal for the "Apache Asia Roadshow" in Shanghai in October soon (currently pending an updated submission based on feedback from the committee). Several experienced members are kindly mentoring and helping the local Chinese committers with this, and the Subversion PMC is looking to co-locate something with this. More work has been done on the archive apachecon site, and some talk slides have been added. We hope to add more soon too. We are waiting on infra for a few bits relating to this site though (INFRA-3931) BarCamps -------- BarCampApacheOxford was 1.5 weeks ago, and went well. Around 60 people attended, and lots of excellent sessions were held. Local sponsorship ended up covering all of the costs. Two committers who are hoping to run local barcamps took part in the organising and attended, and we hope to hear more about their own events soon. BarCampApacheSpain in Serville (Sevilla) is about a month away, and progressing nicely. Things progress with a planned BarCampApache on the Saturday after ApacheCon. The local organisers have met several times, and we're just waiting on a confirmed venue before announcing signup. The ApacheCon planners have discussed rooms for the hackathon and Tuesday in-conference BarCamp, which is now largely sorted. Ari continues to look for possible venues for a 2nd BarCampApacheSydney (the lovely spot used last year isn't alas an option) No other BarCamps are currently planned. Robert is looking into a possible Bradford one for next year though. ApacheCon NA 11 --------------- Registration stood at just under 300 at the last report from the producer (including committers and speakers), which apparently compares fine to past years. The rooms for meetup spaces have been largely confirmed, and we hope to announce meetup signups to PMCs soon. Submissions for the Fast Feather Track are still being sought, and we may be able to add additional spots for this if we get enough good proposals. Nick and Sally have had several discussions (including one in person) to discuss ApacheCon, and met with the producer for two hours to discuss progress and problems. Once we get meetup signups announced, and a talk for the current single gap confirmed, we look good for the ASF task list. The list of producer tasks needed was confirmed. Some have now been done, others are expected soon, and Sally is driving the process of ensuring they get done. Lots of positive things came from the meeting too. Future ApacheCons ----------------- Discussions have begun on the apachecon-discuss list about two possible future ApacheCons with very different formats. One would be a producer driven event in a typical conference hotel, much like past ones, and the key questions here revolve around what the producer would do/not do, and what we'd do. The other would be a more community style event, in a SAP conference venue with the venue costs covered by SAP sponsorship. We don't expect to have anything ready for approval for several months, especially on the former. We would encourage any board members with experience and/or interest to join in the discussions. Committee --------- No changes this month. An email was sent to members@ about a number of foundation committees (including ConCom) about a month ago, but no new volunteers stepped forward. We may look at encouraging some of the likely possible new people over beers in Vancouver!
General ------- We have created a 2nd public list, small-events-discuss@ to complement apachecon-discuss@, which have been announced and listed on the website. We hope these will allow us to widen participation in planning and organising events, drawing in new blood and widening our number of events. Discussions on our event anti-harassment policy peaked in late July and have now wound down, so a vote on the draft policy is underway. The ApacheCon policy is also being reviewed, and we hope to approve and announce both shortly. We held a CFP for our one day track at GotoCon in Amsterdam, selected talks and notified successful+unsuccessful speakers. We are also running a small community event on the Saturday to which all committers have been invited. We expect to use the new small events list to help plan this further. So far, the process of working on a small track at an external event (aiming at outreach to developers) is going well. Sally and Justin are working with some of our Chinese based committers for the Shanghai "Apache Asia Roadshow" in late October, which now has a CFP. Gav has kindly been helping to tidy up many of our old and un-used lists. The calendar <http://community.apache.org/calendars/conferences.html> has been updated with a listing (alongside the existing grid view), and queries around it clarified. ApacheCon NA11 -------------- The producer has been busy at another conference for the last fortnight, so things are a little behind. Sally has a list of things we need from SCP, and has kindly been driving this forward to ensure it gets done. She also has a list of the things we need to do (relating to our responsibilities over the schedule/selection/etc), and will be ensuring we do our part as soon as things are unblocked! Sally has been doing great work with sorting out the keynotes, announcing things as confirmed, and generally keeping things moving PR and non. Several people have volunteered to help with the organising as Track Chairs, and they will likely be reaching out to fill backup speaker gaps soon (as needed). The signup for Fast Feather Track is open, and committers reminded about the $300 signup rate deadline. BarCamps -------- BarCampApacheOxford is in just under a month, and preparations are going well. Our trainee organisers continue to both learn and do much of the work, which is pleasing. Local sponsors have been approached, and discussions around larger ones has flipped back to concom@. We hope that we'll be able to get people from the OOo podling along to both learn and share. BarCampApacheSpain in Serville (Sevilla) is about 2 months away and progressing nicely. A venue has been secured, publicity is underway and local sponsors have been engaged. Work continues on the design for the t-shirt. Things are looking very hopeful for a BarCampApache in Vancouver the day after ApacheCon. Nick and Ross are working with the BarCamp community in Vancouver, and they seem confident we'll be able to announce shortly. Ari is looking into venues for a possible 2nd BarCampApacheSydney Future ApacheCons ----------------- Now we have announced the two new discuss lists, we hope to shortly kick off discussions soon on the future of ApacheCon. The aim is to seek advice and input on a possible call for producers, assuming we could produce requirements that would both satisfy the board and be workable. This process is expected to take several months, and we would welcome input from the board on shaping this as the process progresses. Discussions continue with a potential host of a low cost, community run style ApacheCon (still). Once we hear about that one way or another, we can either start discussing how it'd work, or where we might host such a beast instead. Committee --------- No changes this month. An email was sent to members@ about a number of foundation committees (including ConCom), and we hope with that and the new public lists we'll be able to draw in new blood
Larry asked what the future holds for ApacheCon or other conference events. The consensus currently is for the conference committee to hold more, smaller events than ApacheCon.
General ------- We approved one external event under the third party branding policy, and clarified that another didn't need it. We were approached about an event in Beijing in early October, but the close proximity to the planned roadshow event in Shanghai meant we declined. The roadshow isn't confirmed yet, but Justin's mentoring them and we hope they'll be ready to get the final ok and announce soon. We are planning to put on a single day Apache track at GotoCon in Amsterdam in October, and hopefully host a BarCamp or Hackathon the day after. We'll announce this plus the CFP for this shortly, once it's confirmed what space and volunteers we have for the Saturday part. Work continues on the old ApacheCon sites archive. We're almost there... There were discussions on funding ASF presenters at third party events, which concluded that this wasn't ConCom's role. Organisers, however, were considered our role (see BarCamps) ApacheCon NA 11 --------------- Things are progressing, though more items on the ASF task spreadsheet are red (overdue) than one would ideally like... The schedule is up, all speakers notified, all unsuccessful submitters have been given the bad news, but not all track backup speakers have yet been identified and told (some have). We're likely to reach out to some likely suspects to fill the roster of track chairs shortly. The next big thing then is PR related, helping speakers and track chairs get the word out. (Sally has kicked this off for a few of the tracks already) All speakers who asked for help with travel costs are being covered by the producer. TAC is aware of this. Registration numbers are I'm told doing ok compared to other years. BarCamps -------- Nick and Ross have been speaking with a potential local organiser of a BarCampApache on the Saturday after ApacheCon in Vancouver. The idea is to run an internal facing BarCamp on the Tuesday, and an external facing one off-site on the Saturday. Zak is trying to round up enough local organisers for this (we have mentors and funding, just boots on the ground we're waiting on!) We may have a BarCampApache in Amsterdam on the 15th of October, after GotoCon, Arje is talking to other committers in the area to see if we have enough volunteers to let this happen. If not, we'll just do a hackathon or similar. Organising continues for BarCampApacheOxford in September. Our trainee organisers are helping out a lot, especially on putting together documentation. After a vote, one organiser was approved to have their travel cost to attend covered, and one was previously covered by external sponsorship. Otherwise organising is on track. We expect to hear more about the provisionally approved BarCampApache's in Pune, Nuevo Hambourgo and Cairo after Oxford. Future ApacheCons ----------------- The current ApacheCon has taken more volunteer effort this month than planned for, so things haven't proceeded as much as hoped. Discussions on what public lists we should have, and what should be discussed where are nearly complete. Once that's complete, we'll be emailing committers@ to let them know what lists exist, and inviting them to join those that interest them. We'll then kick off discussions on what we would need from a commercial producer if we were to do another commercially produced conference. We're still waiting on a potential host of a low cost, community run style ApacheCon. Discussions and investigations are happening there. Once we hear about that one way or another, we can either start discussing how it'd work, or where we might host such a beast instead. Committee --------- No changes at this time.
AI: Jim to follow up with concom on volunteer vs contract work
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Noirin
Plunkett to the office of Vice President, Conference
Planning, and
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation
of Noirin Plunkett from the office of Vice President, Conference
Planning, and
WHEREAS, the members of the Conference Planning Committee have
chosen by vote to recommend Nick Burch as the successor to
the post;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Noirin Plunkett is relieved
and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the
office of Vice President, Conference Planning, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Nick Burch be and hereby is
appointed to the office of Vice President, Conference Planning,
to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the
Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death,
resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a
successor is appointed.
Resolution 7E was approved unanimously by roll call vote.
General ------- There has been lots of discussions this month about the Third Party Event Branding policy. We now have a published events calendar, a section in the policy about date clashes, a section on how to apply, and committee guidance + example emails for implementing it. One event has been approved under the policy, and we're expecting applications from two more shortly. A discussion is also on-going about what lists we should have, and how much we can push to public lists. Once this has completed, we'll better document what should go where, and then do a push to get more people involved through subscribing to lists of interest to them. ApacheCon NA11 -------------- All selected speakers have now been notified, and most have accepted. Backup speakers should be being contacted shortly where needed. Some announcements have gone out from/about accepted talks. The provisional schedule should be posted shortly. The speaker selection/notification/acceptance/declining process hasn't been as smooth as hoped, partly because not all the required management features were delivered from crowdvine in time. Shared Google Docs has come to the rescue here, and the planners have done some great work making sure not too many balls were dropped... Going from a selected list of talks to accepted speakers has taken more volunteer energy than hoped though, which is something to be aware of for the future. Otherwise we seem to be currently slight ahead of where we've been in past years. BarCamps -------- BarCampApacheSpain has been approved for Seville for Saturday 8th October, and announcements should go out soon (when the organisers are ready) BarCampApacheOxford is aiming to officially open signups this Wednesday (the event is in September). Several potential future BarCamp organisers have joined the organisers list to help and learn. Discussions are on-going about potentially funding future BarCampApache organisers to attend Oxford to learn from the process. Sally has kindly agreed to fund one of the three applicants, and it's expected that the decision on concom funding for the other two will happen shortly. No other BarCamps are currently on the horizon. Future ApacheCons ----------------- No progress has been made on deciding what we might want from a producer for a potential NA12 commercial event, and it's unlikely we'll do anything until the lists are all sorted. We're waiting to hear back from a potential European venue about a possible community (non-commercial) conference. Once we hear about that, we can either start discussing how it'd work, or where we might host such an event instead. Private discussions with committers at Berlin Buzzwords shows there's strong volunteer energy in running such an event in Europe though, which is positive. Committee --------- A vote on the new VP was held, and the only candidate (Nick Burch) was approved. Once we sort out what lists we'll be running, and announce them, we'll hopefully get quite a few more committers involved. At that point we may well propose some new people for committee membership.
Knockree Retreat ---------------- Around 30 committers came out to Ireland last weekend. The BarCamp part went well, with lots of interesting sessions, and several projects got plenty of coding done. Thanks to the volunteers who helped with the driving and the organising, and also to Alfresco for the beer! While everyone at the event seemed to enjoy it, and everyone quizzed agreed it was a good event, signup numbers were lower than hoped. The format seems to work well for those who come, but we're going to need to look into how we advertise / explain this style of event. ApacheCon NA11 -------------- The CFP has closed, and a provisional schedule with 5 tracks was worked out at the retreat (with assistance from anyone who stayed near the main table too long!). The schedule was then discussed on the planners list, and has now been passed to the producer. Notifications should be going out shortly, though talks selected as the backup session for a track may not be notified for a bit longer (depending on if a first choice speaker declines). Cloudera have announced Hadoop World, produced under a MOU for the use of the brand. Unfortunately, this clashes with ApacheCon, and the MOU lacked a clause preventing this. The guidelines have been updated for future conferences, and Sally has kindly been working with Cloudera to try to make the best of the situation. We do still have a strong set of Hadoop talks from non-Cloudera PMC members. BarCamps -------- A BarCampApache in Oxford for September has been approved. As part of this, it is planned that a few new organisers from outside Oxford will join the team, be mentored through the process, and attend. This should increase the pool of available organisers to help spread the geographic reach of our BarCamps. An announcement to committers about how to take part in this, and a general reminder about organising events, should go out shortly. Several people have come forward interested in running a BarCampApache in their home town, but none are yet quite ready. Mentors have been found for these potential organisers. Ross, Nick and Sally have been in discussions with a possible local organiser for a post-ApacheCon BarCamp in Vancouver. Other Events ------------ Jimmy Ling is working with several others to put together a proposal for another Asian RoadShow, likely for August. There are some outstanding questions on the format and location before it can be approved. Future ApacheCons ----------------- There was lots of discussions in Knockree about possible future models for ApacheCon. Several people have agreed to start investigating the options for a community (non-commercial) event in Europe. We need to come up with a better idea of what we'd want for a commercial one before we can sound out possible producers to work with to come up with an alternate model. It's unlikely that we'll have anything to bring to the board for at least a few months though Committee --------- I have enjoyed chairing this committee for the last two year; however, it's now time for a new VP. Nominations were open for two weeks; three candidates were nominated, but two turned down their nominations. A vote on the remaining candidate is ongoing.
Roy would like to see total ASF cost including TAC and cost per attendee reported at the conclusion of each concom event.
The CFP is currently open for ApacheCon NA'11. Although we're ahead of where we have been in other years, the schedule remains tenuous. Of particular concern, elements that I thought had been cleared up on my call with the producer appear not to have been - apparent already are the lack of reports and issues around program selection. We do have volunteers to work on the program selection, but we still need to figure out the technical details - I had understood on the call that the mechanism was already in place and it was just a matter of adding appropriate ACLs. This appears to have been a misunderstanding. I've brought these issues up, and hopefully we can sort them out sooner than later. OSCON have come onboard as a Community Partner of ApacheCon. They will tag all Apache-related sessions and provide a single jump-off point with information about those sessions on their website. They are also amenable to providing space for Apache groups to meet onsite, particularly on the Sunday before the conference. In return, we will provide promotion for OSCON on the ApacheCon site, in our emails and via social media. Things are going well for the Retreat. We have fewer signups than last year, but still a month to go. We're also significantly less likely to have no-shows this year, as people are buying tickets (paying for their food) ahead of time. Once again thanks to the EA for her help with Retreat logistics - two TAC attendees will be joining us! Nick's work to ensure archive copies of previous ApacheCon sites are available and served from our infrastructure is well underway - huge kudos on what is a mammoth task! Several proposals in various states of readiness have been floated on the ConCom list for BarCamps, as well as for alternate types of events. No significant progress has been made, but it's heartening to see things starting to stir again--spring has finally sprung!
The CFP for ApacheCon NA 2011 has opened. We have had volunteers to help with ApacheCon, filling many of the previously-defined roles that the planning team requires - unfortunately, without either the promised plan from the producer, or clear visibility into what *is* happening, it's very difficult to translate that volunteer energy into action. Attempts to open a bid process for future ApacheCons have been unproductive. This is due to lack of input from the committee as to what we want future events to look like - without this input, it seems like a waste of time to ask the EA for assistance in scoping out the actual process, formal requirements etc. The role for ConCom going forward seems uncertain, with few clear opinions or volunteers. Nick Burch is working to ensure archive copies of previous ApacheCon sites are available and served from our infrastructure. The draft Events Branding Policy has been voted on and ratified as official - many thanks to Shane for pushing this through. We hope that this will make things both clearer and fairer for third parties wanting to run events focused on our projects. The Hadoop World MOU has been updated to reflect these policies, and I expect it to be signed by both parties in the next week or so. Many thanks to Karen Sandler and Marc Miller for their assistance with the updates required. Many thanks to the EA for assistance with the Retreat so far. TAC applications have been received, and ticket sales have opened - with 18 tickets sold at time of writing.
No report was received.
Action item: Jim is everything ok?
No written report was submitted. Planning is underway for the ApacheCon in Vancouver later this year.
Barcamp Apache Sydney went well. In the end, we had around 60 people sign up, and about 45 attend on the day. However, it did seem to be the right 45, as almost everyone spoke at least once, and we had some excellent sessions and discussions! Cost wise, we did better than expected on sponsorship, and the slightly lower than planned numbers also helped. This means the concom expense is likely to only be $1500, well down from the original approved amount of $2400. (The exact cost will depend on the exchange rate when we do the balancing payment between the ASF and ish, who kindly helped out with processing the AUD donations and expenses) Plans for another Apache Retreat in Ireland are underway, although no formal proposal has been received yet. Basis Technology are planning to run a "Solr and Text Analytics" conference soon, and have been in contact with ConCom about use of marks. There has been no further progress on an event in Brazil - previous plans in this area have fallen down on lack of local involvement/support, so we have not chased these opportunities.
A report was expected, but not received
ApacheCon North America, Atlanta 2010 ============================== Registration continues, and numbers are comparable to last year. Meetups, key signing, BarCamp etc are beginning to come together, and look like everything will be in good shape at the event. Apache Retreat Hursley ================== 27 attendees, from Europe and the US, made it to Hursley for a weekend Retreat in September. The Apache Subversion and Apache Tuscany projects got particularly involved, with several representatives present, and some in-depth discussions were reported that helped resolve issues within the projects. One suggestion coming out of the Retreat was to engage PMCs/core community members early, to help projects get critical mass at such events, to get maximum benefit. The cost per attendee, to the Foundation, was not at a level we would like to see from future events - however, this was always going to be an experimental endeavour, and did come in under budget. Where next? ========== Discussions on the future of Apache events are ongoing. Noirin and Sally were to draw up an RFP for future conference-style events, but work on ApacheCon has delayed this. Hopefully it will be possible to do this at ApacheCon, with the intention of giving our current producer a "first option", and soliciting alternative proposals in the new year. In order to ensure some degree of continuity, for our community and for the conference, ConCom request that the board sanction a single-year extension of our current contract for an event in North America in 2012. This has been added to the agenda, #11 B.
A report was expected, but not received
ApacheCon North America, Atlanta 2010 ===================================== Registration is now open, and we're working out some of the glitches in the website. Noirin has signed the contract addendum, and will get it into SVN as soon as possible! Apache Retreat Hursley ====================== Work continues on the Retreat, and several committers have registered. The timing with regard to the board meeting is unfortunate, but we still expect a great event. Other news ========== The Apache Dev House will not be held as originally planned, because of the clash with the board meeting :-) Noirin has some productive decisions with the OSCON team while in Portland, and hopes to provide a report to ConCom soon.
Approved by general consent.
ApacheCon North America, Atlanta 2010 ===================================== All speakers have been informed of the status of their proposals. It's becoming clear that some proposals were lost in the ether, but we've been working to fit in those that we're aware of. Registration is still not open - Charel assures us that this will be done very soon, and Noirin and Tony are working furiously to get all the talks into and scheduled in the CMS. Apache Retreat Hursley ====================== ConCom has agreed to underwrite a proposal for the Apache Retreat Hursley, to be held at IBM's Clubhouse near Southampton in August. The budget is estimated at approx $9kUSD, with a target audience of 40 attendees. Registration is now open for the Retreat, and TAC applications are being accepted. We're awaiting an invoice from the IBM Clubhouse to cover the deposit on accommodation, and costs for bedding etc. Other costs will be settled after the event. There was some discussion about the name of the event, but the ultimate decision was that the Retreat name should remain for this event. Other news ========== Sally brought back a great report from MEAOSS - it's obvious that there's local interest in Open Source and Apache, but not yet clear exactly what help/support we can and should provide. Cloudera have informed us of their intention, under our MOU, to hold Hadoop World in October this year. Riptano and Rackspace are organising a Cassandra Summit in August. Jonathan Ellis has agreed to provide oversight in his role as PMC chair. There has been some discussion of whether we should continue to participate in Open World Forum in future years. This has not yet been resolved. The ConCom list is now open to all committers. We haven't yet told committers about this, but it's a change in policy that was first mooted at the Apache Retreat in April. In the spirit of Greg's original proposal for the Apache Retreat, the first Apache Dev House will be held in Zurich, the weekend of September 11th/12th. There are no expectations for this event! There has been a suggestion that ConCom consider working with OSCON to provide Apache content in a structured manner. Noirin is working on getting all the right introductions and finding out what's possible, and will report back to the committee shortly.
Several directors expressed concern about $225/person+TAC costs for an individual meeting, such is not sustainable.
Noirin clarified that they are experimenting with alternatives as there is no ApacheCon Europe; costs are running well under budget.
Noirin will take this into consideration for future events.
ApacheCon North America, Atlanta 2010
==============================
Track organizers are still working to inform all speakers of the status of
their proposals. We aim to have all tracks finalized in the next week or so.
Tutorial selection is complete, and Charel is working with Cvent to ensure that
tutorial registration is a better experience than it has previously been. The
new tutorial registration system is not yet ready, but we're hoping it will be
up shortly.
Other news
==========
Sally is currently at MEAOSS Forum (our first venture onto the African
continent, to the best of my knowledge!), representing ConCom and the ASF.
Three cheers for Sally, who is presenting *three* sessions at the conference
("About the ASF", "Apache in the Cloud", and "Making Money with Open Source
Software") - a great show!
The ASF has been recognised as a community partner for TransferSummit UK, to be
held next week in Oxford. This is not an official ASF event, but several
members and committers will be present(ing).
ConCom has agreed to underwrite a proposal for the Apache Asia Roadshow 2010,
to be held in Shanghai, in August. The budget is estimated at approx $12kUSD,
with a target audience of 400. It's gratifying to see how the investment,
particularly of time/energy, in China has blossomed - the organizers of the
current proposal are all local members/committers.
ConCom has received a proposal to host a second Apache Retreat at IBM's
facility in Hursley, UK, in September. At the time of writing, the vote has
just opened. The budget is estimated at approx $8kUSD.
We received two requests to participate in a Spanish-language event in Ecuador,
but volunteers were unavailable at the short notice we received.
General discussion as to whether full cost recovery was expected by smaller events such as Retreats, and the consensus was that no, these events are not expected to be zero-sum.
ApacheCon North America, Atlanta 2010 ============================== Sally has stepped up to fill the Programming Lead position, and has done a fantastic job of getting things back on track. Communication has improved immensely, and a small CFP is now open, focused on the selected tracks and themes. Tutorial selection is almost complete, and Rich, Noirin and Charel will work with Cvent to ensure that tutorial registration is a better experience than it has previously been. Other news ========== Emmanuel Lecharny has spearheaded our involvement in the Open World Forum (Paris, October 2010). This looks like it will be a much better experience on both sides than last year. Nick Burch, Brett Porter and Aristedes Maniatis have stepped up to run an Apache BarCamp in Sydney, provisionally in December. They're currently working on finding a suitable venue. The London Java Unconference organisers will run their second event in London, June 26th, in association with the ASF. Several local members and committers plan to be in attendance, and the organisers hope to give the London Java community a sense of the wide variety of interesting projects hosted at Apache. Lucid Imagination have been given permission to use the name "Lucene Revolution" for an event in Boston, September 2010. This is a for-profit event, and there has been no objection from the Lucene PMC.
Noirin clarified that the "off track" that was recovered from was a combination of Bill stepping down as Programming Lead, and retreat.
Apache Retreat, Ireland 2010 ======================= 32 people attended the Apache Retreat in Wicklow, over the weekend of April 9-12. Danese and Nick Burch put together an excellent BarCamp on Saturday and Sunday - although participation was a little slow to begin with, people soon got the hang of things and seemed to enjoy the unconference format. The venue was also conducive to smaller discussions, which several people seemed to find productive, and the excellent weather was enjoyed by all! Transport to the venue was not as simple as it could have been - the initial plans to organise a shuttle bus fell through because of lack of time on the part of the planners. The internet connectivity was also problematic, although the hostel staff were very willing to help where possible, including opening ports as requested and performing regular reboots of the DSL router! Some attendees felt the intermittent connectivity improved the very participatory nature of the event, but it is certainly something that should be looked at for future events of this kind. ApacheCon North America, Atlanta 2010 ============================== In conjunction with the PR themes for the ASF this year, three themes have been chosen for ApacheCon NA in Atlanta: Innovation, Servers, Cloud. Twelve track-days have been proposed and selected by both PMCs and cross-PMC groups, but communication with the track organisers has been delayed by the resignation of the Programming Lead, and the timing of the Apache Retreat. We are still on a reasonable schedule, and ahead of where we've been in previous years, but work is required to ensure that the communication difficulties of last year are not repeated. Other news ========== Apache Lucene EuroCon will be held in Prague from 18-21st May. This event is not organised by ConCom, but net proceeds will be donated to the Apache Software Foundation. In discussion at the Apache Retreat, it became clear that the original reasons to restrict ConCom work to members-only are no longer wholly relevant. We anticipate inviting committers to get involved shortly, once the immediate communication issues are better resolved.
No report recieved. Brian to follow up
Apache Roadshow Asia 2009 (Nov. 28-29 (Beijing); Dec 3-5 (Colombo)) ======================================================== Beijing report included in Jan board report. Sri Lanka report: In order to develop and improve the community of Sri Lankan contributors to Apache, the local community of contributors, along with the Sri Lankan Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community organised part of the Apache Asia Roadshow 2009. On December 3rd and 4th there were 12 sessions that covered various ASF projects, mainly conducted by local committers. There was also a panel discussion on the 4th about "Impact of Apache on Asia and Asia on Apache". December 5th included a special invitation-only gathering and "unconference", allowing speakers and audience to meet, mingle, and exchange ideas in an informal environment. Apache Retreat, Ireland 2010 ======================= Registration continues to climb, along with local interest. The hostel are looking forward to welcoming us, and have been helpful in making arrangements so far. ApacheCon North America, Atlanta 2010 ============================== A planning team has been assembled for this conference, and we're getting started on pulling together a great event! Other events ========== The TrafficServer and httpd projects held a successful hackathon & meetup on January 25 & 26th at the Google Campus. The proposed Berlin event will no longer be held under an Apache banner. Various issues arose, and the short deadlines required to pull off the event meant that they could not be resolved to mutual satisfaction.
Apache Roadshow Asia 2009 (Nov. 28-29 (Beijing); Dec 4-6 (Colombo)) ======================================================== No report was received from the Colombo team, despite requesting same in December. The Beijing team reported a successful event, with huge thanks to key people "on the ground" (particularly Peter Cheng, Xiao Feng, and Robert). Intel's support was also greatly appreciated. The team did report difficulties with co-ordination between the two events, and found that the lack of a dedicated co-ordinator keeping things in sync made for several small-but-significant hassles. Apache Retreat, Ireland 2010 ======================= Registration continues to climb slowly. Noirin and Colm have both been travelling since the beginning of the year, but we're still planning to publicly announce the BarCamp in January, and do another registration push before the end of the month. Other events ========== The TrafficServer and httpd projects are holding a hackathon & meetup on January 25 & 26th at the Google Campus. This event is supported by Google, and presented at no cost to attendees or to the Foundation. Simon Willnauer and Isabel Drost are planning a Hadoop-focused event in Berlin in May. ConCom is currently discussing support for this event, and may seek funds from the board next month to do this. Several issues with the ConCom Supported Events policy have come to light in this process, but the organising team have been patient with ConCom as we work things out! Memorandum of Understanding with Cloudera ==================================== The Memorandum of Understanding between the Apache Software Foundation and Cloudera with regard to Hadoop World has been signed by both parties. We plan to renegotiate within a year, with the aim of ensuring this agreement falls in line with the Trademark Policy currently being developed at the Foundation.
Justin suggested faxing to the ASF # vs fighting scanners.
Noirin indicated that she tried to make it clear to SCP that there are no plans for an ApacheCon in Europe this year, and has not asked anyone to look at venues on behalf of ConCom/the ASF.
ApacheCon US 2009 (2-6 November) ============================== This was a great event! We had approximately 750 attendees overall, including about 250 Meetup attendees. The Mayor of Oakland declared November 4th to be Apache Software Foundation Day, and the Governor of California sent his congratulations and thanks for our work over the last ten years. Apache Roadshow Asia 2009 (Nov. 28-29 (Beijing); Dec 4-6 (Colombo)) ======================================================== Both events were successful, more details in next month's report Apache Retreat, Ireland 2010 ======================= Registration and publicity are proceeding at a slow but steady rate. Noirin has been co-ordinating with local BarCamp folk, and we'll announce the BarCamp publicly in January. A further registration push will follow at that time. Other events ========== Various people are interested in running local events in 2010: -Bruno Borges, Ross Gardler and Danese Cooper are interested in holding an Apache Track at FISL, June 2010 in Brazil -Noirin Shirley, Emmanuel Lecharny and Bertrand Delacretaz are working with the Open World Forum organisers to provide Apache-related content at the OWF in September 2010, Paris. The exact format has yet to be determined. -Simon Willnauer and Isabel Drost are interested in holding an Apache event in Berlin, dates TBD. This may be pushed to 2011, depending on what other events go on in Europe in 2010. -Ross Gardler & others are interested in holding an Apache event in the UK in June/July 2010, to be co-ordinated with OSWatch's annual conference -The TrafficServer and httpd projects are planning on doing a hackathon & meetup on January 26th at the Yahoo Campus. This event is planned to be entirely developer focused, and no ConCom assistance has been requested.
- Apache Roadshow Asia 2009 is transitioning from planning to execution with a great deal of activity around web/wiki sites, press, registration, etc. Communications are happening on the planners-2009-asia internal mailing list and an update will be provided for the December report. - ApacheCon US 2009 is a wrap, summary will be in the December report. - Apache Retreat, Wicklow IE, registration continues to gather steam. - Additional activity around new gatherings was fostered during AC/Oakland and these proposals will be appearing on the board report as the event teams are assembled with interest in creating each of these meetups/events. Breaking news will be on the primary ApacheCon wiki http://wiki.apache.org/apachecon/
ApacheCon US 2009 News (2-6 November) ---------------------------------------------------- * Registration continues apace, PR is going well. * The conference now has two platinum sponsors, Microsoft and Thawte. ApacheMeetUp/BarCampApache Asia 2009 (Nov. 28-29 (Beijing); Dec 4-6 (Colombo)) ---------------------------------------------------- * Dates have now been fixed for the events, and budget secured from the board. * Charel will work as producer for the Beijing event, Sanjiva will co-ordinate all arrangements in Colombo. * Justin and Greg have booked tickets for Beijing and Colombo. * Awaiting draft contract from Charel for producing Beijing event. * Sanjiva has organized a team of local volunteers in Colombo led by Sagara Gunathunga (committer on WS). * Colombo team has posted a draft schedule and location information. Apache Retreat, Ireland 2010 ---------------------------------------------------- * No news since last report Other ---------------------------------------------------- * A question was raised about extending the ACUS committer rate to non-committer TAC attendees. The producer had been given the impression that TAC attendees would be committers, but only half of them are. This has been resolved for the current conference, but TAC need to negotiate an agreement for future conferences.
Status report for the Apache Conference Planning Project (September 2009) ApacheCon US 2009 News (2-6 November) ---------------------------------------------------- * Early bird registration is now closed. Registration is looking good, but we're still hoping to do more work on PR * Based on contributions to this event over the past 6 months, that list of 7 subsidized planners is Noirin, Shane, Bill, Sally, Jean-Frederick, Jukka and Ross * We are in the last lap on tutorials; whatever tutorials aren't filled on or about the 1st of October will be canceled. ApacheMeetUp/BarCampApache Asia 2009 (Late Nov/Early Dec 2009) ---------------------------------------------------- Location: Beijing, China and Colombo, Sri Lanka Date: Nov. 28-29 (Beijing); Dec 4-6 (Colombo) Organizers/ConCom reps: Justin, Sanjiva, Xiao-Feng This is a follow-on to last year's BarCamp in Beijing that we conducted. The event will be a travelling road show. One day of talks and one day of BarCamp in Beijing. Two days of talks and one day of BarCamp in Colombo. We will focus primarily on local speakers and developers. Our goal is to encourage local Apache committers to get together and interact with other local community members who are interested in open source. While we'll publicize to the best of our ability, the goal is really to connect local folks. In Beijing, we have space available at either a local university or Intel's Beijing office (where we had the BarCamp last year). The current preference is to return to Intel's office. In Beijing, we have some other volunteers besides Xiao-Feng assisting - including Peter Cheng who was instrumental in helping out at last year's Beijing event. Peter has suggested combining forces with "OpenSourceCon" and producing a joint 2-day event. The structure would still be roughly the same, but there may be an additional 1/2 day of talks. We are pretty close to finalizing the structure for Beijing. At this time, organization in Colombo is not yet as advanced as Beijing. However, given Sanjiva's past experience with events in the area, Justin is optimistic that it will all pull together just in time. =) Sanjiva has committed to finding some local space in Colombo. We are optimistic that we will find a venue at little to no-cost soon. Apache Retreat, Ireland 2010 ---------------------------------------------------- * Signup is now open for the Apache Retreat, Knockree Youth Hostel, for the weekend of 9th-12th April. Several committers have registered, but further publicity is currently on hold to be coordinated with ApacheCon publicity. Other ---------------------------------------------------- * Discussions are ongoing about what we want to do in Europe in 2010, and what kind of support we might need for those events. Currently, it looks like the Apache Retreat for committers, plus a potential second event along more traditional lines for users/developers. * SCP has expressed an interest in working with the ASF in Europe in 2010. * ConCom has requested a budget of 30kUSD for the financial year to April 2010. This will cover the costs of the Apache Retreat in Ireland, as well as projected costs for the events in Asia. There is also a small discretionary fund included, for the support of other events.
Justin reports that sponsorship dollars specifically for events are hard to obtain at this time.
Shane described the plans for the retreat.
ApacheCon US 2009 (2-6 November) ------------------------------------- * Planning is progressing nicely. All speakers have been notified of the status of their proposals. * The schedule is pretty much complete, and Sally did some great publicity at OSCON. * Early bird committer rate was extended to 21st August. As of 11th August, 40 committers had registered at the early bird rate. Average over the last five conferences has been 44 people registered on the committer rate (excludes speakers etc), so this is pretty good going! ApacheMeetUp/BarCampApache Asia 2009 (Late Nov/Early Dec 2009) ---------------------------------------------------- * No news since last report Apache Retreat, Ireland 2010 ---------------------------------------------------- * A proposal for the first Apache Retreat to be held in Ireland was voted on by ConCom and approved. * Noirin Shirley, Colm MacCarthaigh and Ross Gardler will plan this event. * A location has been secured, Knockree Youth Hostel, for the weekend of 9th-12th April
Status report for the Apache Conference Planning Project (July 2009) General News ------------ * Noirin Shirley has assumed the chairwoman and V.P. post at the Conference Planning committee, as directed by the board June 17th. The traditional ConCom leadership reception was held for her on members list. ApacheCon US 2009 News (2-6 November) ------------------------------------- * Two meetings on the 10th and 13th gave track coordinators and mentors a chance to bounce ideas around for their programs and project activities at the event, and these ideas are being brought back to the planners for discussion and hopefully implementation. * Each PMC should have a completed schedule by 20th July, all are progressing with their program plans with some already completed. * The completed programming is being published over the coming week. * The next group of all-PMC communications will center around planning meetups or other evening activities, and around publicity and outreach of each project's presence and encouraging registration. * Planning to really kick off publicity at OSCON - majority of the schedule will be published on the site at that point. * Registration is now open - Committers must register before August 1st to get the best possible deal (a $100 savings)! * Speaker travel has been a contentious issue. There is presently a budget of $700 per track-day for travel, to be allocated on an as-needed basis. * All CFP session submitters were sent followup communications on the 9th, clarifying travel and programming by PMCs. Acceptance notification is progressing as each track is finalized. Final not-accepted notifications will be made the week of July 20th. * No update yet on BFBB activity. The present budget does not assign cost of this reception (also serving as the welcome reception) to the foundation, provided ApacheCon sponsorship and registration remain on target. ApacheMeetUp/BarCampApache Asia 2009 (Late Nov/Early Dec 2009) ---------------------------------------------------- * We are looking at dates around the week of November 30th-Dec. 4th. The current discussion includes Beijing and Colombo, with the possibility of an extra stop in Shanghai. * We are talking to some potential sponsors to see if we can help defray the cost of the event.
Shane: BFBB costs: when will we know if sponsorship/registration targets are met?
Bill Rowe: As for the specific targets, and how they relate to the main welcome reception/bfbb and bfbb/afterparty/rave, I will raise these questions at the scheduled planning meeting on Thursday (sadly the day after the directors have met) and provide more concrete data and updates in the August report. Note that one Platinum sponsor is currently confirmed.
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Lars Eilebrecht to the office of Vice President, Conference Planning, and WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation of Lars Eilebrecht from the office of Vice President, Conference Planning, and WHEREAS, the members of the Conference Planning Committee have chosen by vote to recommend Noirin Shirley as the successor to the post; NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Lars Eilebrecht is relieved and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office of Vice President, Conference Planning, and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Noirin Shirley be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Conference Planning, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed. Special Order 7C, Change the Conference Planning Chair, was approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.
General News ------------ * Lars Eilebrecht is resigning from the V.P. position. The Conference Planning Committee has voted to make Noirin Shirley the new V.P. of the Conference Planning project. ApacheMeetUp/BarCampApache Asia 2009 (December TBD) --------------------------------------------------- * The planning team has decided to push the event back to December 2009. ApacheCon US 2009 News (2-6 November) ------------------------------------- * The first media call occurred to detail how SCP, Planners, ConCom and PageOne would best work together. * Planning and scheduling work continues. * Opening of registration was scheduled on the 22nd, but due to many busy schedules and slow responses to planners questions, this may no longer be realistic. It will certainly open in the coming weeks.
General News * The Conference Planning Committee has voted to cancel the renewal of the current ApacheCon master contract with SCP. The cancellation letter has been sent to SCP 25 April 2009, and SCP has confirmed receipt of the cancellation letter 8 May 2009. The ASF will honor all its obligations under the current conference production agreement, and at least ApacheCon US 2009 will still be produced under the current agreement with SCP. It is the intention of the Conference Planning Committee to continue working with SCP, and to start discussions on a new contract and conference production agreement with SCP. ApacheMeetUp/BarCampApache Asia 2009 (Aug/Sept) * No further updates at this time. ApacheCon US 2009 News (2-6 November) * Public Relations: SCP has engaged the PR company Page One for this event as recommended by PRC/ConCom. The PRC will take a more active role and oversee PR for ApacheCon US 2009. Exact details are still to be worked out. * Contract/Pricing: the conference pricing is being proposed to the planners R.S.N. in order to finish all of the contractual details for this event. * Content: the following PMC's have proposed 1/2 day or more of programming and the timing is being coordinated this week; Hadoop, Lucene, Tuscany, Synapse, Web Services, Directory, Geronimo, Tomcat, OFBiz, httpd including mod_perl, and Felix, plus the ever welcome Community and Business days. One special track is being prepared, led by Jukka, for the umbrella of Content Technology with specific PMC's to be determined. These tracks represent at least five major contingencies of interest, ensuring a well rounded program for a very broad and diverse audience. * Further PMC messaging and detailed tasks will be following by the end of May, with the intent of opening registration on Jun 22nd with the full blitz of PR and PMC-originated communications.
General News ------------ * New Blog The conference planning committee has started using http://blogs.apache.org/conferences/ as their new blog (blogs.apachecon.com redirects to the new location). * New Members The conference planning committee has voted to add Ross Gardler and Jean-Frederic Clere as new members. Both received 9 +1 votes (and no other votes). ApacheCon Europe 2009 News (23-27 March) ---------------------------------------- * ApacheCon in Amsterdam has ended successfully. Despite the difficult economy, the conference attracted more than 360 attendees for the main conference and trainings. The free project MeetUps on the first two days have been very successful and attracted about 300 attendees. * The conference video archive will be online by 15th of April. * A press release will be published 15th of April. * Signing the contract addendum was delayed, but this has now been done. ApacheMeetUp/BarCampApache Asia 2009 (Aug/Sept) ----------------------------------------------- * Event leads are Justin Erenkrantz, Sanjiva Weerawarana, and Xiao-Feng Li. * The expected timeframe is late August/early September, but the precise dates have not been finalized. * The current plan is to hold the event in a minimum of two locations: Colombo, Sri Lanka and Beijing, China. Shanghai, China is being explored as a potential third location. * The event will be free to attendees, with one day of invited talks, and one day of BarCampApache. * The goal is to have a shoestring budget and to try to have those costs covered by local sponsorships. * Xiao-Feng has already discussed with a local University regarding receiving space in Beijing. It is also expected that Sanjiva would be able to find an appropriate space in Colombo. * It is expected that SCP will be retained to handle the conference logistics. * Final details regarding location and scheduling should be available in time for the May report. ApacheCon US 2009 News (2-6 November) ------------------------------------- * The planning meeting was a huge success (defining success as making many new, innovative and original plans and entertaining lively debate). * Tutorial speakers will be notified very soon as to their acceptance, and again assigned mentors to work with them through the entire approach to the show, the goal is not to need to cancel any accepted tutorial session. * The tracks will not be programmed until a letter is sent to all PMCs this week with an invitation to partner with the Planners on their project's related material (track sessions, meet-ups, symposium etc.) This should be in draft within two weeks, and final in four weeks. * The show will consist of a 2 day BarCamp, and Hackathon together co-located in the (very large) main hall. This part of the event culminates with the 10th Anniversary BFBB (Big Feather Birthday Bash) on Tuesday eve. Wed-Fri will follow a typical format during the day, and expand on the idea of project specific symposiums/unconference tracks for PMCs which choose to participate. Wed-Fri eve (and Sun/Mon eve overflow) will have space available for project meetups for those who wish to organize them, with the alternative of BOF sessions for projects who would rather have those. * SCP has not completed the budget, so the registration fee schedule, speaker compensation etc are all up in the air. Various alternative scenarios have been requested for ConCom to review.
Geir has asked to discuss the PR augmentation proposal? Jim takes the action item to run the discussion on list, as it's already ongoing on several mailing lists. Jason notes positive experience with a PR firm with respect to traditional PR and working with analysts, but that he's not sure it's the best choice for event publicity. Jim notes desire for closure before beginning of May, for budget approval.
General News ------------ * The conference committee is planning to have another Apache event in Asia for 2009, similar to the one held in Beijing in 2008. Details are still to be defined. ApacheCon Europe 2009 News (23-27 March) ---------------------------------------- * Lars Eilebrecht replaces Noirin Shirley as the lead for the conference as she has unfortunately become unavailable, and will not be able to attend the conference. Ross Gardler, and Shane Curcuru will be helping as co-leads with the conference. * BarCampApache was changed to be free of charge. * On Monday and Tuesday evening Meetups for the Apache projects Wicket, Jackrabbit, Lucene, Maven, and Portals will be held. Each Meetup is self-organized by each project, and can be attended free of charge. ApacheCon US 2009 News (2-6 November) ------------------------------------- * The Call for Papers deadline was extended until March, 14th, and is now closed with 210 submissions. Acceptances and rejections should be emailed by the end of April. * The planning meeting is scheduled at the Mövenpick March 28 & 29. The planners team includes Bill Rowe (lead), Cliff Skolnick (co-lead), Lars Eilebrecht, Shane Curcuru, Danese Cooper, Jean-Frederic Clere, Ross Gardler, Noel Bergman, Sally Khudairi, Justin Erenkrantz, Santiago Gala, Rich Bowen and Noirin Shirley (the last three are unlikely to attend the Amsterdam meeting at this point). * Conference registration is planned to be opened by May 2009.
BarCamp is free, and the Hackathon requires a fee... we are unhappy with that situation. The rates are determined by SCP.
General News ------------ * No news since last report. ApacheCon Europe 2009 News (23-27 March) ---------------------------------------- * Registration for the conference was announced January, 27th. * A press release was published February, 10th. * A print advertisement will appear in the CeBIT edition of the iX magazine of Heise publishing, Germany. In addition, an advertisement will be placed in Heise's Open Source newsletter. * Feathercast is in the process of publishing interviews with the trainers. * Live video streaming and archiving will be performed by Linux New Media again. ApacheCon US 2009 News (2-6 November) ------------------------------------- * The planning meeting for the conference will be held the weekend after ApacheCon Europe 2009 in Amsterdam at the Mövenpick hotel. * The Call for Papers deadline is February, 27th.
General News ------------ * Lars and Justin have resumed conversations with SCP about how ApacheCon should be structured going forward. We're still in the process of discussing the high-level parameters to ensure that we're all on the same page about the goals of a re-structure. ApacheCon US 2008 actual budget and anticipated Europe 2009 budget will be delivered by SCP for review by the Conference Committee and the Board. Mutual goal is to have initial phase of the restructuring in place by ApacheCon US 2009. ApacheCon Europe 2009 will be produced under the current master contract with SCP. * Delia is working on an ASF 10th Anniversary logo for ApacheCon in co-ordination with Sally/PRC and the Conference Committee. * ApacheCon US 2010 will be held at the Atlanta Peachtree Westin hotel, and ApacheCon "North America" 2011 will be held at the Westin Bayshore in Vancouver, Canada. ApacheCon Europe 2009 News -------------------------- * Ross Gardler replaces Martin van den Bemt as co-lead for the conference * Speaker notifications for the conference were sent in December. * An initial Web site is available at http://www.eu.apachecon.com/c/aceu2009/ Some content is still missing, and Aaron is still working on some issues with displaying the schedule. * Registration for the conference will be opening soon. Prices will be quoted in EUR, but the actual registration fee will be charged in USD. * Registration prices were slightly lowered as we no longer have to charge VAT on conference prices in The Netherlands. ApacheCon US 2009 News ---------------------- * No news since last report.
General News ------------ * Georg Richter has resigned from the Conference Planning committee. ApacheCon Europe 2009 News -------------------------- * Sending of speaker notifications for the conference has been delayed due to ongoing work finishing the new CFP system. However, speaker notifications will be sent by the end of December. ApacheCon US 2009 News ---------------------- * No news since last report. Apache Meet Up and BarCamp Beijing 2008 --------------------------------------- * The Apache Meet Up and BarCamp events in Beijing have finished successfully.
General News ------------ * The conference committee is planning to make it easier for PMCs (or even third parties) to run smaller Apache-related events such as meetups or BarCamps, and to get formal recognition by the ASF, i.e., being allowed to use the Apache name and logo for the event. The criteria and guidelines for such events are still to be created. * The conference committee has started exploring the possibilities of having an ApacheCon (or smaller Apache event) in Brazil in 2009. ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * ApacheCon US 2008 in New Orleans has finished successfully. Attendance numbers were still good, even though the recent economic downturn affected many attendees. * Despite moderate attendance numbers, the first BarCampApache was a successful event, and the conference committee is planning to continue having BarCamp events at future ApacheCons, and as separate events. ApacheCon Europe 2009 News -------------------------- * The planning meeting was held the weekend before ApacheCon US 2008 in New Orleans, and a draft schedule is available. The final schedule should be available soon, and speakers will be notified. ApacheCon US 2009 News ---------------------- * The conference committee has voted William A. Rowe, Jr. the lead, and Cliff Skolnick the co-lead for ApacheCon US 2009. Call for 2009 US team members has already begun, and expected to wrap up in November. * The Call for Papers has opened 7 November 2008, and the planning meeting will be held the weekend after ApacheCon Europe 2009 in Amsterdam. Apache Meet Up and BarCamp Beijing 2008 --------------------------------------- * Apache Meet Up Beijing 2008 will be held 5 December 2008 at the Intel office in Beijing, followed a one-day BarCamp Beijing event. * The conference committee has voted to make the Apache Meet Up in Beijing a formal ASF event (not ApacheCon). The event will be using ApacheCon Web site infrastructure, but doesn't require any ASF funds. Registration for the event will be free, and thus we do not expect to generate any profit from the event. * Three conference committee members have signed up to organize the event, and it will be produced by SCP.
General News ------------ * no general news ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * The contract for ApacheCon US 2008 between the ASF and SCP has been created as an addendum to the master contract, and has been signed accordingly. * Keynote speakers are confirmed, and have been announced. * Presentations of one track of the conference and all keynote sessions will again be available via live video streaming. Keynote sessions and lunch presentations will be available free of charge. * Registration numbers are in line with the last two conferences. ApacheCon Europe 2009 News -------------------------- * The CFP has opened using the new ApacheCon CMS system and is accepting papers. * Noirin and Martin have switched positions, and Noirin is now the lead for ApacheCon Europe 2009. ApacheCon US 2009 News ---------------------- * no news since last report
Geir to follow up with Henning on publishing a list of get reimbursed when future conferences are organized.
Aaron noted that Charel's putting together a small event in Beijing in December. Details being worked out with concom now.
General News ------------ * no general news ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * Several updates and improvements to the conference and social Web site have been and are still being made. Otherwise there are no news since last report. ApacheCon Europe 2009 News -------------------------- * We are working on getting the new CFP system ready, and the CFP announcement published. ApacheCon US 2009 News ---------------------- * no news since last report
General News ------------ * no general news ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * On 30 July, another press release has been issued highlighting the OFBiz Symposium, BarCampApache, CampHadoop, the voluntourism day, and the CrowedVine site for the conference. * Early bird prices are being extended by 2 weeks to drive early registration. * Issues when registering for training classes when using the committer discount code (for the conference) are being corrected by SCP; a note to the committers list will be sent out when fixed. * The OFBiz and various special event schedules are being posted on the Web site, showcasing the wide variety of content we'll have, and the first keynote speaker is being confirmed shortly. OSSummit Asia 2008 News ----------------------- * OSSummit Asia 2008, as originally envisioned, is canceled. The corresponding entry has been removed from the ApacheCon Web site. * The Eclipse Foundation has notified us that they have withdrawn from this event. As such, we're now on our own in terms of a China/Asia event. * On Tuesday, 19 August, before the Board meeting the Asia 2008 planning team will hold a conference call with Charel to discuss options. There's a chance of still running a smaller event in Beijing in December. We'll work out a new proposal and submit it back to the conference comittee for review. ApacheCon Europe 2009 News -------------------------- * The planning meeting will be held 1-2 November in New Orleans, the weekend before ApacheCon US 2008. ApacheCon US 2009 News ---------------------- * no news since last report
Aaron provided an update on the call with Charel, and confirmed that the ConCom is looking into options including a potential new two day event, with a new name, in Beijing, and will be following up on this early next week.
Status report for the Apache Conference Planning Project (July 2008) General News ------------ * There are no board-level issues at this time. ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * A press release announcing the opening of registration and the show website has been issued, and additional announce emails will be coming this week, including discount codes for committers. * The OFBiz PMC has produced a proposed schedule for the OFBiz Symposium tracks that will be held at ApacheCon, which will be integrated into the website for all attendees. * We will remind US attendees that the US presidential elections are happening the Tuesday of ApacheCon. OSSummit Asia 2008 News ----------------------- * We are in the final stages of scheduling a small (~10 speaker) low-cost one-day "road show" event that will travel to Shanghai and Beijing in early December. We are trying to determine which speakers from our original program are available and then build a suitable program around that. ApacheCon Europe 2009 News -------------------------- * no news since last report ApacheCon US 2009 News ---------------------- * no news since last report
General News
------------
* Result of the Hackathon Survey for ASF Committers
April 2008, the Conference Committee asked all ASF committers in a
survey various questions about Hackathon events. The complete result
of the survey is available in the following PDF:
http://wiki.apache.org/apachecon-data/attachments/ApacheConBrainStorm/attachments/ASF-Hackathon-Committer-Survey-April-2008.pdf
The result of the survey has been posted to the committers list
together with some further information and decisions the conference
committee has made based on the result:
- Hackathon will become a public event
Starting with ApacheCon US 2008, the Hackathon will become a
public event open to all committers, contributors and interested
developers. With making it a public event we hope that it will
be easier to find sponsors.
- Hackathon will continue to be co-located with ApacheCon
58% of all committers replied in the survey that Hackathons
should be co-located with ApacheCon. Only 5% voted against this.
- Registration fee for attending a Hackathon
The result of the survey shows that many people are willing to
pay a small fee for attending a Hackathon, especially if food
and drinks are included. However, it is the conference
committee's aim to make attending the Hackathon free of charge or
to charge a small fee only. However, depending on the location of
the Hackathon and available sponsors, etc., this may not always
be possible.
- Camp Apache - the new BarCamp event
Some people think that we should have a bit more structure at the
Hackathon. However, instead of changing the Hackathon itself, we
will have a new BarCamp/Unconference event called "Camp Apache"
at ApacheCon US 2008 which will be held the second day of the
Hackathon as an additional event.
ApacheCon US 2008 News
----------------------
* Speakers have been notified, and the training and session schedule
is confirmed along with the pricing model. Registration is expected
to open beginning of July. The formal show Web site using a new CMS
is being tested.
* The OFBiz PMC has expressed interest in presenting training materials
and two days of session content co-located at ApacheCon US. The OFBiz
PMC is working on organizing content and finding speakers, and we
will work with SCP on marketing this additional content to the OFBiz
community.
* We will have a new BarCamp/Unconference event called "Camp Apache" at
the conference. It will be held on Tuesday, 4 November 2008, i.e.,
same time as the second day of the Hackathon. It will be a public
event and a small fee will be charged for attending.
ApacheCon Europe 2009 News
--------------------------
* Final date and location for the Europe 2009 conference:
23-27 March 2009
Moevenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Centre
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
* The lead for the conference will be Martin van den Bemt with
Noirin Shirley being the co-lead.
ApacheCon US 2009 News
----------------------
* Final date and location for the US 2009 conference:
2-6 November 2009
Oakland Convention Center and Marriott Hotel
Oakland, CA, USA
There is no update or revised status for OSSummit.
General News ------------ * Renewal of SCP Contract The ApacheCon contract with SCP has an evergreen clause, and the conference committee has voted to renew the contract. * New Committee Member The conference committee has voted to add Sally Khudairi as a new member. Sally received 9 +1 votes (and no other votes). The change was acknowledged by the board April 16, 2008. * Hackathon Survey for ASF Committers The conference committee is planning to make some changes to ASF Hackathon events, and is currently running a survey for ASF committers asking them about their preferences and wishes for future Hackathon events. The result of the survey will be published. In addition there is a discussion page about ApacheCon and Hackathon on the ApacheCon wiki at the following URL: http://wiki.apache.org/apachecon/ApacheConBrainStorm * ApacheCon events in 2009 The conference committee and SCP are in the process of selecting the venues for the 2009 events. Currently the plan is to hold ApacheCon Europe 2009 in Amsterdam the last week of March again for the last time, and ApacheCon US 2009 in Oakland in November. Regarding Europe, SCP has been made aware that we need to find a solution regarding the Hackathon and the new BarCamp event, i.e., that charging a high fee is not an option. Conference Overview ------------------- * ApacheCon US 2008 Location and date: New Orleans, November 3-7, 2008 Lead: Shane Curcuru Co-Lead: Noel J. Bergman Planning list: planners-2008-us@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * OSSummit Asia 2008 (joint-conference with Eclipse Foundation) Location and date: (location and date to be defined) Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Shirley Planning list: planners-2008-asia@apachecon.com Producer/Owner: OSSummit LLC ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * No news since last board report. OSSummit Asia 2008 News ----------------------- * No news since last board report.
General News ------------ * J. Aaron Farr will be the lead of the Web site team of the conference committee which is responsible for maintaining all Web pages related to the conference committee. * The conference committee has decided to stop any efforts regarding an Apache-related event in Peru for 2008. * SCP and the conference committee are in the process of discussing location and hotel options for ApacheCon Europe 2009. The conference may be held in Amsterdam again, but no final decision has been made yet. Conference Overview ------------------- * ApacheCon Europe 2008 Location and date: Amsterdam, April 7-11, 2008 Lead: Noirin Shirley Co-Lead: Lars Eilebrecht Planning list: planners-2008-eu@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon US 2008 Location and date: New Orleans, November 3-7, 2008 Lead: Shane Curcuru Co-Lead: Noel J. Bergman Planning list: planners-2008-us@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * OSSummit Asia 2008 (joint-conference with Eclipse Foundation) Location and date: (location and date to be defined) Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Shirley Planning list: planners-2008-asia@apachecon.com Producer/Owner: OSSummit LLC ApacheCon Europe 2008 News -------------------------- * The Hackathon was attended by about 60 committers and guests (10 registered for a single day only). * A post-conference press release will be published a few weeks after the conference. ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * The Call for Papers for ApacheCon US is closed (received more than 200 proposals), and the planning meeting was held the weekend after ApacheCon Europe 2008 in Amsterdam. Speakers will be notified by the end of May. * The US 2008 Web site is planned to be published by the end of May. * The conference committee is discussing changes to the overall structure of the conference and hackathon. One decision has been to experiment with BarCamp/Unconference sessions in addition to regular ApacheCon sessions. The current plan is to have single-day BarCamp on the Tuesday during the conference, and to combine it with the Hackathon in terms of registration. OSSummit Asia 2008 News ----------------------- We have a number of speakers who still have tickets to Hong Kong that need to be used. (Most speakers had their tickets fully reimbursed by the producer. Some speakers voluntarily held on to their tickets.) We will try to determine which speakers are in this situation and then try to either schedule them to go to smaller events to raise awareness or for a 1-2 day OS Summit conference in Asia later this year. We had tentatively set a date of December 2008 for OS Summit Asia in Shanghai, but, after the recent EclipseCon, the Eclipse Foundation representatives have decided that this date won't work for them due to a pending release and an Eclipse board meeting in December. The ASF is currently contemplating whether to still hold a small event in December with only local Eclipse representatives. After discussions with the producer in Amsterdam last week, we have agreed that our focus should be on building the conference up from the grassroots. Therefore, we will focus on raising our visibility at smaller events. We have also decided to substantially scale back the conference to 1-2 days at most from a longer 5 day ApacheCon-style event to better fit the regional expectation for these events. There is a COPU event in Guangzhou in May that J. Aaron and Greg are planning on attending. Justin and Erik Abele (among others) have volunteered to also help out OS Summit by attending other regional events when we decide the promotional/awareness investment is worth it.
Some discussion about confusion about the VAT. Defer to ConCom for a recommendation.
General News ------------ * no general news Conference Overview ------------------- * ApacheCon Europe 2008 Location and date: Amsterdam, April 7-11, 2008 Lead: Noirin Shirley Co-Lead: Lars Eilebrecht Planning list: planners-2008-eu@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon US 2008 Location and date: New Orleans, November 3-7, 2008 Lead: Shane Curcuru Co-Lead: Noel J. Bergman Planning list: planners-2008-us@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * Apache Track or ApacheCon Peru 2008 Location and date: Lima, Peru, October 18, 2008 An Apache-related conference or track may be co-hosted with the VISION 2008. No final decision has been made yet. * OSSummit Asia 2008 (joint-conference with Eclipse Foundation) Location and date: (location and date to be defined) Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Shirley Planning list: planners-2008-asia@apachecon.com Producer/Owner: OSSummit LLC ApacheCon Europe 2008 News -------------------------- * Number of registrations is very good. * Press releases about ApacheCon Europe have been published 28 Feburary and 17 March. * SCP's PR agency is setting up telephone interviews for journalists with select speakers and conference planners. ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * The Call for Papers for ApacheCon US was published 1 March. * A press release about the CFP and ApacheCon US will be published by the end of March. ApacheCon Peru 2008 News ------------------------ No news since last board report. OSSummit Asia 2008 News ----------------------- No news since last board report.
Geir to take action to work with Lars to resolve Peru
Aaron provided an update on China (targetted for December)
General News ------------ * no general news Conference Overview ------------------- * ApacheCon Europe 2008 Location and date: Amsterdam, April 7-11, 2008 Lead: Noirin Shirley Co-Lead: Lars Eilebrecht Planning list: planners-2008-eu@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon US 2008 Location and date: New Orleans, November 3-7, 2008 Lead: Shane Curcuru Co-Lead: Noel J. Bergman Planning list: planners-2008-us@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * Apache Track or ApacheCon Peru 2008 Location and date: Lima, Peru, October 18, 2008 An Apache-related conference or track may be co-hosted with the VISION 2008. No final decision has been made yet. * OSSummit Asia 2008 (joint-conference with Eclipse Foundation) Location and date: (location and date to be defined) Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Shirley Planning list: planners-2008-asia@apachecon.com Producer/Owner: OSSummit LLC ApacheCon Europe 2008 News -------------------------- * A press release about ApacheCon Europe was published 23 January. * ApacheCon Europe 2008 Hackathon Sponsorship: The ASF board has approved the special resolution of ConCom to sponsor the Hackathon at ApacheCon Europe 2008. ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * Unfortunately due to reduced volunteer attention, the CFP is not yet opened, but will be soon. Shane and Ken are currently working on getting the CFP ready by end of February. The deadline for the CFP will be the week of ApacheCon Europe 2008 as the planning meeting will be held the weekend following the conference. ApacheCon Peru 2008 News ------------------------ No news since last board report. OSSummit Asia 2008 News ----------------------- * The last conference call was held Feb 13th. Final date and location are still being determined, though Shanghai in early December seems most likely. There are several other open source events in China this spring. The planners have expressed interest in cooperating with these events to promote OSSummit.
The blocking issue on the Hong-Kong conference is cost.
Approved by General Consent.
General News ------------ * Contracts for 2007 The contract addendum for ApacheCon Europe 2007 and the addendum for ApacheCon US 2007 have been added to the foundation repository. Conference Overview ------------------- * ApacheCon Europe 2008 Location and date: Amsterdam, April 7-11, 2008 Lead: Noirin Shirley Co-Lead: Lars Eilebrecht Planning list: planners-2008-eu@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon US 2008 Location and date: New Orleans, November 3-7, 2008 Lead: Shane Curcuru Co-Lead: Noel J. Bergman Planning list: planners-2008-us@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * Apache Track or ApacheCon Peru 2008 Location and date: Lima, Peru, October 18, 2008 An Apache-related conference or track may be co-hosted with the VISION 2008. No final decision has been made yet. * OSSummit Asia 2008 (joint-conference with Eclipse Foundation) Location and date: (location and date to be defined) Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Shirley Planning list: planners-2008-asia@apachecon.com Producer/Owner: OSSummit LLC ApacheCon Europe 2008 News -------------------------- * Registration has been opened, and a formal announcement and press release will be made soon. ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- No news since last board report. ApacheCon Peru 2008 News ------------------------ * There have been some further discussions with the organizers of the VISION 2008 conference. It will be held in Lima 15-17 October, with an Open Source Day on 18 October. If and how the ASF participates has not been decided yet. OSSummit Asia 2008 News ----------------------- * There have been further conference calls and discussions, but no final decision about a new location and date have been made yet.
Approved by General Consent.
General News ------------ * New Committee Member The conference committee has voted to add Martin van den Bemt as new member. Martin received 6 +1 votes (and no other votes). The change was acknowledged by the board (Henning Schmiedehausen) on November 16, 2007. * Renewal of SCP Contract The ApacheCon contract with SCP has an evergreen clause, and the conference committee has voted to renew the contract. This extends the contract with SCP through 2010. * Meet the Producer A "Meet the Producer" session was held at ApacheCon US 2007, November 13 to discuss ApacheCon. Fewer ASF members than expected attended the meeting, but the feedback and discussions have been very constructive, and ConCom will be - as far as possible - trying to address the issues or future conferences. * New concom-site Mailing List A new mailing list (concom-site at apache.org) has been created with the purpose of discussing and developing a new Conference Management System. Conference Overview ------------------- * ApacheCon US 2007 Location and date: Atlanta, November 12-16, 2007 Lead: Rich Bowen Planning list: planners-2007-us@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * OSSummit Asia 2008 (joint-conference with Eclipse Foundation) Location and date: (location and date to be defined) Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Shirley Planning list: planners-2008-asia@apachecon.com Producer/Owner: OSSummit LLC * ApacheCon Europe 2008 Location and date: Amsterdam, April 7-11, 2008 Lead: Noirin Shirley Co-Lead: Lars Eilebrecht Planning list: planners-2008-eu@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon US 2008 Location and date: New Orleans, November 3-7, 2008 Lead: Shane Curcuru Co-Lead: Noel J. Bergman Planning list: planners-2008-us@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon Peru 2008 (name not final yet) An Apache-related conference may be co-hosted with the VISION 2008 conference in Lima, Peru. Details are being discussed and no final decisions have been made yet. ApacheCon US 2007 News ---------------------- * The conference in Atlanta finished successfully. According to Charel Morris of SCP, the conference has been profitable. The exact details will be provided once we receive the final profit & loss statement from SCP. ApacheCon Europe 2008 News -------------------------- * The schedule of speakers has been finalized, and all speakers have been notified November 28. * An initial version of the Europe 2008 Web site is live since December 4th. * Registration is planned to be opened by the end of January 2008. OSSummit Asia 2008 News ----------------------- * OSSummit LLC and the planning team is still in the process of finding a new date and location. The conference will remain in China, but it may not be Hong Kong again. A final decision has not been made yet. ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * The Call for Papers is planned to be opened January/February 2008. The planning meeting will be held the weekend after ApacheCon Europe in Amsterdam. ApacheCon Peru 2008 News ------------------------ No news since last board report.
OSSummit is still postponed: a new target date should be established in 4-6 weeks. The new date is still expected to be in 2008.
The report was modified to indicate that the contract with SCP is *through* 2010 instead of merely being *until* 2010.
We discussed limiting archive access initially to just the concom members and the board -- this received quite a bit of opposition. Henri to draft an email for Joe to automate sending periodically (suggestion: monthly) to leakage sensitive lists like this one and legal-internal. Beyond that, the main concern is to limit the number of posters, not the number of readers.
Approved by General Consent as modified.
General News ------------ * Meet the Producer Every ASF member is invited to a "Meet the Producer" session to be held at ApacheCon US 2007, Tuesday, November 13. The purpose of the session is to provide interested members with the opportunity to discuss ApacheCon with our producer and the rest of the planning team. An email with specific information about the sessions has been posted to the members mailing list on November 12. * ApacheCon Blog/Planet ConCom decided to install a blog/planet (Roller) on the ApacheCon server. The plan is to aggregrate ApacheCon per-event blogs, and to have general ConCom/ApacheCon blog. * ConCom Web Team A Web site sub-committee has been created to rework and revise the contents of general (non-event specific) ConCom and ApacheCon Web pages on www.apache.org and www.apachecon.com. Initial volunteers are J Aaron Farr, Noel Bergmann, and Lars Eilebrecht. Conference Overview ------------------- * ApacheCon US 2007 Location and date: Atlanta, November 12-16, 2007 Lead: Rich Bowen Planning list: planners-2007-us@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * OSSummit Asia 2008 (joint-conference with Eclipse Foundation) Location and date: Hong Kong, (date to be defined) Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Plunkett Planning list: planners-2007-asia@apachecon.com Producer/Owner: OSSummit LLC * ApacheCon Europe 2008 Location and date: Amsterdam, April 7-11, 2008 Lead: Noirin Plunkett Co-Lead: Lars Eilebrecht Planning list: planners-2008-eu@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon US 2008 Location and date: New Orleans, November 3-7, 2008 Lead and Co-Lead: not yet defined Planning list: not created yet Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon Peru 2008 (name not final yet) An Apache-related conference may be co-hosted with the VISION 2008 conference in Lima, Peru. Details are being discussed and no final decisions have been made yet. ApacheCon US 2007 News ---------------------- At the time os this report, ApacheCon US 2007 and the Hackathon are being held in Atlanta. The total number of registrations for the conference is about 350 (incl. 70 training registrations). ApacheCon Europe 2008 News -------------------------- The planning meeting for the conference was held 10-11 November in Atlanta. ApacheCon Europe 2008 will be again, a 5-day conference with 2 days of trainings (7 tracks) and a 3-day main conference (3 tracks). In addition to regular presentations it is planned to add a 2- or 3-day Fast Feather Track. Out of about 270 proposals, 68 presentations and trainings have been selected. Speaker notifications will be sent by the end of November. OSSummit Asia 2007 News ----------------------- The event planned for November 2007 in Hong Kong has been postponed until 2008. The reason for this was the unacceptable low number of registrations (less than 30 non-speakers) and the low number of sponsors. The decision was made on Tuesday by OSSummit LLC (Charel Moris), November 6, and announced on a planners conference call. The sponsors and speakers were notified on November 6 and 7, and the members of the ASF and Eclipse Foundation on November 8. Please see the corresponding email posted to the members list for further information. Charel Morris expects to have a new date by November 16 (it is planned to move the conference to either late May or early September). ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- Lead for this event will be Shane Curcuru with Noel J. Bergman being the co-lead. ApacheCon Peru 2008 News ------------------------ No news since last board report.
We discussed how to broaden committer participating, but eventually the discussion was tabled.
Approved by General Consent.
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Ken Coar
to the office of Vice President, Conference Planning, and
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation
of Ken Coar from the office of Vice President, Conference
Planning, and
WHEREAS, the members of the Conference Planning Committee
have chosen by vote to recommend Lars Eilebrecht as the
successor to the post;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Ken Coar is relieved and
discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office of
Vice President, Conference Planning, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Lars Eilebrecht be and hereby is
appointed to the office of Vice President, Conference Planning,
to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the
Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death,
resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until
a successor is appointed.
Special order 7A, Change the Conference Planning Chair, was
approved by Unanimous Vote.
General News ------------ * New Chair and VP for Conference Planning Project The election for the new ConCom chair started on 21 September 2007 and ended on 1 October 2007 and identified Lars Eilebrecht as the winner. The final vote tally was: Lars Eilebrecht 6, Noirin Plunkett 4, Rich Bowen 0, Shane Curcuru 0 (two votes were changed to resolve a tie between Lars and Noirin). Lars Eilebrecht takes over the position from Ken Coar who has served as the chair and VP of the Conference Planning Project since its creation in 1999. The members of the conference committee would like to thank Ken for the many years of effort that he has put into ConCom, and that he has decided to remain involved in ConCom. * New Committee Members The conference committee has voted to add J Aaron Farr and William A. Rowe, Jr. as new members. Both received 8 +1 votes (no other votes). The change was acknowledged by the board (Henri Yandell) on October 7, 2007. * New Volunteers The concom mailing list got a couple of new subscribers, i.e., members who are interested in helping out with various bits and pieces. * ApacheCon Blog/Planet In the past there used to be an ApacheCon blog, but it was removed due to non-use. However, it has been decided that more blogging about ApacheCon is desirable. Discussions have started on how and where to create a general ApacheCon blog/planet and per-conference blogs. No final decision has been made yet. * Conference Calls ConCom has started using the Raindance conference call service (provided by Covalent) for ConCom-related conference calls. Currently, there are weekly conference calls as we are close to ApacheCon US and OS Summit. Minutes for these conference calls are usually created and made available at the following location: https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/foundation/ApacheCon/2007/minutes Conference Overview ------------------- * ApacheCon US 2007 Location and date: Atlanta, November 12-16, 2007 Lead: Rich Bowen Planning list: planners-2007-us@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * OS Summit Asia 2007 (joint-conference with Eclipse Foundation) Location and date: Hong Kong, November 26-30, 2007 Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Plunkett Planning list: planners-2007-asia@apachecon.com Producer: OS Summit LLC * ApacheCon Europe 2008 Location and date: Amsterdam, April 7-11, 2008 Lead: Noirin Plunkett Co-Lead: Lars Eilebrecht Planning list: planners-2008-eu@apachecon.com Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon US 2008 Location and date: New Orleans, November 3-7, 2008 Lead and Co-Lead: not yet defined Planning list: not created yet Producer: Stone Circle Productions, Inc. * ApacheCon Peru 2008 (name not final yet) An Apache-related conference may be co-hosted with the VISION 2008 conference in Lima, Peru. Details are being discussed, and no final decisions have been made yet. ApacheCon US 2007 News ---------------------- * The conference is only a few weeks away and registration numbers are slowly growing. As of October 14th, 186 individuals have registered for 157 full conference passes; plus various trainings and numerous day passes. * Of 21 trainings, 10 are confirmed (have made breakeven point); a handful may be confirmed pending new registrants, and 7 are likely to be canceled. We continue to reach out to those speakers who's training registrations are below the breakeven point, and rely on their assistance in getting the word out to their target audience. * A preliminary schedule for the Fast Feather Track has been published. 15 of 18 slots are confirmed with talks about Incubator projects or projects that recently left the Incubator. * Sponsorships are going well; see conference Web site for complete list of all sponsors, media partners, and exhibitors. * The event is covered by our ApacheCon master contract with SCP, but the necessary addendum still needs to be created and signed. Lars is in contact with Charel and is waiting for a first proposal/draft from her. OS Summit Asia 2007 News ------------------------ * Justin is in contact with Charel and the Eclipse Foundation in order to get the event covered by a proper contract between the ASF and OS Summit LLC. It has been decided to do a two-way contract, i.e., a contract between Eclipse and OS Summit LLC, and a contract between the ASF and OS Summit LCC. On October 9th a short conference call was held with Larry Rosen, Justin Erenkrantz, and Lars Eilebrecht to discuss some general legal questions and the course of action. * Sponsorships are going well; see conference Web site for complete list of all sponsors, media partners, and exhibitors. * Registration numbers are still very low, given the date: 35 individuals have registered overall, with only a few training registrations. * Several options for improving conference registration have been discussed including a discount code for 'friends of Apache/Eclipse'. * The hard-copy conference program needs to be finalized this week (October 15). ApacheCon Europe 2008 News -------------------------- * Noirin and Lars switched their roles. Noirin is now lead and Lars co-lead for the conference. * The Call for Papers was published September 27, 2007. The deadline for the CFP is October 26, 2007. The planning meeting will be held November 10-11, 2007 in Atlanta (the weekend before ApacheCon US 2007). ApacheCon US 2008 News ---------------------- * The event is covered by our ApacheCon master contract with SCP, but the necessary addendum still needs to be created and signed. Lars is in contact with Charel in order to get the necessary paperwork done. ApacheCon Peru 2008 News ------------------------ * No news since last board report.
Discussed the vote process, no action was taken.
It was observed that we need to increase the visibility of AC/Asia.
Approved by General Consent.
* ApacheCon US/2007 November 12-16, 2007 Leader: Rich Bowen ASF member registration fee: US$400. Registration for ApacheCon US has been open for some time, and trainings are selling well. Individual speakers are promoting their own talks, which seems to be a very effective model. There's 55 days remaining until the conference, and 5 days remaining before the end of the Early Bird prices. Exact registration numbers and revenue forecasts are not yet available. * OS Summit Asia/2007 Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Plunket ASF member registration fee: not yet determined. This is not a traditional ApacheCon, being co-located with an Eclipse event in Hong Kong. Registration has opened, but according to Charel we've had very few people registar so far. That is in part due to the fact neither Apache nor Eclipse have sent out announcements to their committers about registration. We definitely need to pick up the ball on this end and get the word out. We have a handful of sponsors at this point, including (in no particular order): Covalent Google Morph Labs DevZuz Outblaze Sopera Webtide There was a thread recently on the planners mailing list about committer rates and about a hackathon-like event. Details on both items have not been settled. We have settled on Li Gong from Mozilla for one of the keynotes. Another keynote will be a panel of local open source luminaries. I think we're still arranging the final keynote. So far the cooperation between Eclipse and Apache seems to be going well. I am a bit worried about balls being dropped as time is increasingly short, but maybe that's just a reflection of my own personal hectic schedule. * ApacheCon Europe/2008 Leader: Lars Eilebrecht This event will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ApacheCon Europe 2008 will be held April 7-11 at the Mövenpick hotel in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (same location as the Europe 2007 conference). Currently SCP has a contract with the Mövenpick hotel for 2008, but Charel Morris (SCP) is considering to stay in Amsterdam for several years in order to build the conference and attendance. However, no final decision has been made. The Europe 2008 conference will (like previous conferences) consist of 2 days of training sessions and 3 days of normal sessions. The call for papers will be published by the end of September. For the first time the call for papers will include 2-day training sessions in addition to half-day and full-day training sessions. Regarding 2-day sessions, we are contacting potential trainers directly in addition to the call for papers. The deadline for the call for papers will be 26 October 2007, and the planning meeting will be held 10+11 November 2007 in Atlanta (the weekend before ApacheCon US 2007). The www.eu.apachecon.com Web site still shows the old 2007 data, but has been updated to include a note about the date and location of the Europe 2008 conference, and the upcoming call for papers. The ApacheCon Europe 2008 planning team (currently) consists of the following ASF members: Martin van den Bemt, Noel J. Bergman, Rich Bowen, Danese Cooper, Shane Curcuru, Lars Eilebrecht, Justin Erenkrantz, Santiago Gala, Nóirín Plunkett, William A. Rowe, and Carsten Ziegeler. The lead for ApacheCon Europe 2008 will be Lars Eilebrecht, with Nóirín Plunkett being the co-lead. The contact address for the planning team is planners-2008-eu@apachecon.com. Arje Cahn (Hippo) was a great help with ApacheCon Europe 2007 (mainly regarding PR), and he has offered to help with the 2008 conference again. * ApacheCon US/2008 Leader: None yet chosen This will be held in New Orleans. * ApacheCon Peru/2008 Leader: None yet chosen This event will be co-located with the VISION 2008 conference as USMP in Lima. The name may be other than ApacheCon, like the OS Summit was. However, since there is already VISION 2008 and Open Source Day happening, it's unclear what the name of our portion will be.
Project looks healthy, the board is aware of transparency perception issues. The question was raised whether or not it would help if the project had a secretary. It was observed that Shane was defacto acting in this capacity.
Approved by General Consent.
Concom: After significant effort from J Aaron, and much delay (not J Aaron's fault), we now have a website for ACUS07. J Aaron has a vision for where we should be wrt websites and has solicited feedback on the options available going forward. There has also been discussion about potential new formats for Apache events, focused on longer trainings, and solicitation of training sessions from some of our members. Both ACUS and OSSummit are fast approaching - concom would appreciate efforts by other PMCs to promote these events among their communities. In particular, where a training has been scheduled for a project, we would greatly appreciate that project working on advertising the training to its community! =) ACUS07: The website is now available for ACUS07! A number of issues with how it displays have been reported, and are being dealt with. Registration is now open, and a press release has been made to this effect. Jim Gettys of OLPC has agreed to keynote on the Friday, he will hopefully also bring some OLPC laptops with him. Ora Lassila has also agreed to keynote - probably on Thursday. The third keynote slot has yet to be locked in. OSSummit: Press releases in a number of languages have been made across APac, and some work has begun in the English-speaking press. There has been a minor but steady trickle of enquiries about the conference. The session selection and scheduling is almost complete - some last minute scheduling issues have delayed speaker notifications and publishing of the schedule. ACEU08: Planning meeting is expected to happen in Atlanta, the weekend before ACUS. CFP will probably open September 14th, running for six weeks (til October 26th).
Sam to get with Ken to assess his plans.
Approved by General Consent.
(Received from Noirin Plunkett) Please forgive me emailing this without a formal signoff from Ken/the concom PMC - Ken's been out of action a bit lately because of his back, and the deadline was looming a bit. J Aaron is working with Charel & Frazier on our websites. He's done a great job on www.ossummit.com, and is being very diligent in his hat-swapping. The new website for us.apachecon.com is pretty much ready to go. At the moment the hold up is upgrading Stone Circle's Media Temple account to a dedicated virtual server (the current account can't handle more than one Rails app at a time). Once the new virtual server is available, he'll get the site deployed so we can open up registration. With two conferences now being our annual minimum, concom has decided to split into 'teams' per event - the team for ACUS07 includes Ken, Noel, and Lars; Rich is heading up this group. OS Summit Asia has a slightly smaller ASF team, since it's being run in conjunction with Eclipse - J Aaron, Justin and Noirin are keeping things going there. Talks for ACUS07 have been selected and scheduled, and speaker notifications have been sent. Speaker agreements/contracts haven't gone out yet. The new website will include timetable and registration information, as soon as it goes up. The CFP for OS Summit Asia is officially closed; although there were one or two last minute reports of issues with the submission forms, it looks like there won't be a need to extend it. The Eclipse team will select their talks over the next couple of weeks - the ASF planners will be meeting in LA the weekend of August 11th/12th for session selection. This means a slight delay in notifications, but unfortunately it wasn't possible to get everyone together before that. ACEU is over for another year, and despite an attempted drowning, there were no major mishaps.
"Attempted drowning" was put in quotes.
The board continues to be concerned over the chair's absense.
Over time, the board may consider rechartering this as a board committee.
Approved as revised via General Consent.
No report provided or submitted. It was noted that this is the 2nd report in a row that was absent. The board is considering asking for a Concom chair replacement if next month's report is also absent.
No report.
ApacheCon US 2007 will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Peachtree Westin Hotel, November 12-16. This includes the usual 2 days of tutorials and 3 days of main conference sessions. The Call For Papers opened rather later than planned, due to a series of technical glitches and personal crises, but is currently open, and will close on Monday, April 30th. The ApacheCon Planners will meet in Amsterdam, following the conclusion of ApacheCon Europe, to review the submitted talks and select the schedule for Atlanta. There are currently 94 submissions, and we expect to have 72 session slots, in addition to the tutorial/training session slots. The lead for ApacheCon US will be Rich Bowen. Other members of the team include Ken Coar, Noel Bergman and Lars Eilebrecht. I'm not certain at this point who else will be involved in that process, but it is likely that Justin Erencrantz and Noirin Plunkett will be involved in the planners meeting in Amsterdam.
Approved by General Consent.
No report
* ApacheCon 2007/EU ApacheCon 2007/EU in Amsterdam is coming along. There were 251 proposals submitted, of which 71 were accepted and 10 more accepted provisionally as fallback sessions. The scheduling meeting took place in the Atlanta hotel where ApacheCon 2007/US is going to be held later this year, so it served double duty. The Amsterdam conference is scheduled the same week as the local Queen's Day holiday, with the result that there will be only one day of training sessions and standalone hackathon. The hotel fee structure is different in Europe, which means that the expense of the standalone hackathon was visibly itemised rather than being embedded in other expenses as is usually the case. Lacking a sponsor for the hackathon, with the hotel fee structure being what it is, and the conference expense and revenue forecasts being what they were, it was proposed that the hackathon expense be covered by attendees, to the tune of EUR 80 for the one day. (The room cost is covered by other expenses for the rest of the event due to multi-purposing.) This ignited something of a flamewar on the members mailing list, with much vitriol and mostly baseless accusations, resulting in rancour and defensiveness and lowered morale on the part of several of the concom volunteers. The flamewar appears to have died down. * Per-event teams The concom has essentially decided to split up the conference support work (and responsibility) into individual teams, allowing them to focus more closely on specific events and relieving the current shared global responsibility for all events. The first team lead, for Amsterdam 2007/EU, has been selected: Justin Erenkrantz. * Potential events We have been approached by individuals in India and Peru who have much enthusiam for hosting ApacheCon events in their respective regions. At the 2007/EU scheduling meeting we spent about two hours on IRC with Hernán Pachas from Lima, and the conclusion was to work with him to try to have an ApacheCon event co-located with USMP's VISION2008 conference in October 2008. Due to language difficulties and the lack of local ASF personnel, we expect the event will be something like the 2006/Asia conference, for which near total responsibility was assumed by the local organisers. * Upcoming conferences Events for which teams are forming or need to be formed include: - 2007/Asia (perhaps) - 2007/US (Atlanta, Georgia, USA) - 2008/EU - 2008/Asia (perhaps) - 2008/US (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA) - 2008/South America (Lima, Peru)
Greg indicated that he knew some folks that would like to host AC/Asia in Korea.
Approved by General Consent.
The contract with Stone Circle Productions, Charel Morris' company, has been signed. The process took considerably longer than anticipated by both sides due to the desire to obtain repeated legal review of proposed changes. The end result was satisfactory both to the concom and SCP, and constracts SCP to run our conferences for the next three years, with semi-automatic renewal. One of the perpetual issues with ApacheCon has to do with the Web site and registration. In 2000 and 2001 the ASF's systems ran the entire system, but new procedures were needed when we took on Security Travel as the production company -- and even more procedures when S&SV produced ApacheCon Europe 2005 and 2006. All data relating to the conference belong contractually to the ASF, but actually obtaining them when they aren't resident on our systems has been problematic. We experimented with a totally hands-off approach with S&SV, letting them handle all aspects of the site, and even fewer data were made accessible -- and there were accountability problems. For ApacheCon NA 2006 and Europe 2007 we have reverted to handling the content and scheduling on our site, and having only the registration (i.e., the monetary aspect) handled externally. There are still some problems with this, and there is not universal agreement that it's the way to go. Just in case it continues, I have requested a 'lab' to develop a standard API for our vendors to use to communicate with the ApacheCon database, so the mechanism need not be continually tweaked (and made more fragile). Planning for the ApacheCon conferences in Europe and the United States in 2007 is proceeding well. The call for participation for the European conference, which will be held in Amsterdam at the beginning of May, closed on Tuesday night (16 January 2007). The close was delayed a few days due to technical problems which were interfering with submitters being able to log onto the site. The scheduling meeting for the conference will be held 20-21 January 2007 in Atlanta. Over 250 submissions have been received. Due to the smaller numbr of concurrent tracks, selection criteria will need to be aggressive. The U.S. conference this year is planned for Atlanta, Georgia, in mid-November, before the U.S. Thanksgiving Day holiday.
The written report was received late, so Ken provided a verbal summary of the report.
Approved by General Consent.
[ delivered to the Board on November 15, 2006 ] ApacheCon US took place in Austin, Texas this year from October 9-13. The first two days were devoted to tutorials and the last three to conference sessions. There were 5 concurrent tracks of one-hour sessions during the conference proper, with a 6th track on the last day for business-oriented content. There some problems with marketing so the sponsor participation was lighter than anticipated. Nevertheless, the conference should turn a slight profit (awaiting final numbers from SCP). IBM was a sponsor, this time with involvement from a high-enough level within the company that there's hope for some continuity rather than being at the mercy of individual department budgets and plans. There were approximately 500 people in attendance, including a large influx from the local area. The traditional 'hackathon' occurred on the two tutorial days. For the remainder of the week, the hackathon area remained available, and was directly adjacent to the exhibit area. Since the tables all had power, they were frequently in use, and often by people collaborating rather than just individuals. The Apache Geronimo project, for example, had a number of people sharing a table almost continuously. There was no hard network available, only wifi, but that didn't seem to be an issue for anyone. On the second day of the tutorials, an 802.11a network was set up, which had a surprising number of people using it. This conference makes the second the ASF has done with this producer. The ASF has entered into a three-year contract with them for all U.S. and European conferences. The next full ApacheCon will be in Amsterdam at the end of April 2007; the site and dates for the next U.S. ApacheCon have not yet been determined. The growth in attendee numbers is essentially flat, although there were problems with the marketing for Austin. With a longer-term relationship with the producer assured, the conference is expected to become steadily more 'reliable' in terms of travel and education planning, and the attendance is expected to grow gradually.
Justin provided a short post-report activity for ConCom: 1. Atlanta in Dec has been chosen as 2007 US site. 2. Venue decision for 2008 US should happen today (Wed).
Approved by General Consent.
No reported submitted in time for review.
No report submitted.
ApacheCon Asia 2006: o Still no detailed report of attendance, etc. Personal impressions remain that it was a success, and a number of people from India were *very* enthusiastic about having it there next year. ApacheCon US 2006: o Projected attendance figures remain low, but if the trend from this point forward tracks with past conferences', we should have a couple of hundred attendees and make some money. o Brian Behlendorf sent SCP (Stone Circle Productions, Charel's company) contact info for someone in the Austin area, and SCP is pursuing the possibility of reduced rates for locals, since that could result in a few dozen additional. o The contract between the ASF and SCP is still not finalised. It has gone back and forth a few times; right now it is in the ASF's court (with Danese Cooper) checking the latest language. All issues have been resolved except the duration one; SCP wanted a minimum 3-year contract for venue contract and planning purposes, and so the ASF couldn't drop her with huge monetary commitments having been made. A compromise was reached for a 2-year rolling contract. Another alternative that could have had more discussion would have been a 3-year contract with a clause that the ASF would pick up any such costs that were made for future venue holds. There has been some negative feedback on IRC, such as remarks about 'Charel's blackmail,' so it's once again unclear how universally satisfied the members will be. o Sun dropped out of the top-sponsor slot, which is currently vacant. IBM dropped out as a sponsor, but might return -- contact has been made with longer-term resource sources. ApacheCon US 2007: o No plans yet, looking for possible locations.
Ken reported that there was still no official tally regarding ApacheCon Asia, but the numbers all look very good implying it was a very successful show. Ken reported that a company expressed interest in helping us with a Korean ApacheCon. There was no word yet on the next European or US show, but Ken hope that an update would be coming soon. ConCom had not heard anything at all from S&S.
Approved by General Consent
Ken provided a verbal report to the board. Ken reported that ApacheCon Europe 2006 was wrapped up with relatively good success. He reported that ConCom has decided to decline to award any additional contract to S&S for future European conferences. Sessions for AC-US 2006 have been selected and will be announced shortly. A few contract issues are still being worked on. The subject of hardship cases for ApacheCon was brought up again. The main concern of the board was to avoid any sort of subjective classification. There was also discussion on whether the ASF should even be funding hardship cases. It was noted that the PRC should be more of a help with regards to this. Ken reported on some heated discussions regarding PR-related talks, and ConCom was working with the PRC to address these. Ken reminded the board that committers and members receive ApacheCon discounts.
Approved by General Consent
Ken reported that things are on-track for the Dublin show. The next US ApacheCon will be in Austin, TX.
Approved by General Consent.
We are still awaiting financial results from FCP for ApacheCon 2005/US, but they aren't overdue as yet. FCP's records show payment in full having been made to all 2005/US speakers, totalling some US$23K. Several individuals, including Rich Bowen, Danese Cooper, Shane Curcuru, and Noel Bergman, have been hammering out a 'generic' contract for use with S&SV for 2006/US, FCP for 2006/US, and any other conferences going forward. Among other things, it spells responsibilities out quite clearly, and includes penalty clauses for delinquent payments. AFAIK it's still being passed by ASF counsel, and so neither FCP nor S&SV have had a chance to see it and.. comment. S&SV is lining up possible venues for the concom to consider for 2006/EU, which is tentatively planned for the end of May.
Ken further reported that, regarding the 2006/EU show, a venue location of Amsterdam is no longer in the running, due to the expense of doing a conference there.
Approved by General Consent.
ApacheCon 2005/US ------------------ As of this date, the conference is 26 days away. There are There are 201 people registered, of whom 27 are fee-waived. Rough revenue for attendee registrations is US$130K. There are 12 paying sponsors, with revenue roughly US$160K. There are 16 additional sponsors who either have not yet paid (or their payment isn't recorded yet) or who are paying in kind somehow. There are a 4 more sponsors as yet unconfirmed. There are 22 tutorials, variously half- or full-day, but not all have received enough enrollments to remain confirmed on the schedule. Three ASF members are being handled as hardship cases, with travel funding being provided. IBM wishes to sponsor that, and is working out the details with Justin. ApacheCon 2006/EU ------------------ We are preparing an RFQ for the 2006/EU show, and will accept quotes from FCP and S&SV. The intention is to have a clear decision as soon as possible.
Ken further reported that he was looking for more help and "buy in" from ConCom and ASF members.
Approved by General Consent.
The ApacheCon 2005/US conference is moving along well. FCP is doing an impressive job of arranging for sponsors and other support; it's quite refreshing. At the moment there are approximately 100 paid registrants. The delay in payments and information from S&SV for ApacheCon 2005/EU has been blamed on personnel disruptions and vacations in their organisation. There have been ongoing problems with funds being wired from Germany; at this point I'm only aware of one person who has yet to be reimbursed. In the future, we (the ASF) are probably not going to run the conference Web site. (Which comes as a huge relief to lots of people, not least me.) What other restructuring of our operations will happen remain to be discussed and seen. There have been agitations that we do things in significantly different ways, but very little in the way of followup from the proponents. One person has suggested that we contract FCP for all conferences worldwide for the next few year, with a suitably edited (and penalty-barbed) agreement. It's certainly the easy way out, and absent serious discussion of alternatives on the concom@ list I may take it. The issue of whether S&SV should do the next European conference has come up; S&SV themselves seem to think they're going to be doing it. That's still being discussed.
Approved by General Consent.
Ken provided a verbal report, no written report was submitted. ApaheCon EU was deemed successful. There were more attendees than expected.
There has been discussion about future conferences outside of the US, namely in Asia and South America.
Conference planning for the 2005 event in Stuttgart is proceeding apace. We have lined up two days of tutorials and three days of conference sessions. There continues to be concern about the apparent increasing focus on Java-specific technologies; I have heard comments from some people that they're not interested in ApacheCon -- or really in the ASF -- anymore because there's very little there for anyone who codes in any other language, or uses technologies that don't involve Java. Activity on the concom proper is increasing gradually. More and more members are getting involved, as lurkers if nothing else. A restricted RFP was offered to Full Circle Productions (Charel Morris), E-vents (Jeffrey Wainhause), Software & Support Verlag, and Terry Deguili's company. The first three returned proposals; the fourth declined to bid. I expect to make a decision this Friday. This RFP was specifically for managing a 2005 event in the US. An unrestricted RFP for ongoing future US conferences will be offered this Summer, and the contract awarded *after* any US show in 2005. This is intended to spur the 2005 contractor (whomever it might be) to extra effort in order to advance their bid. The ApacheCon host system, which was donated several years ago by AMD, suffered a CPU failure and is now dead. For the interim, the site was moved to some old spare hardware provided by Bill Stoddard. AMD has been contacted about possibly donating a replacement system At this point it has been all but decided that the ApacheCon system will move to the ASF colo where it can receive more distributed support. Due to issues of non-profit/for-profit, it has been concluded that the ApacheCon site needs to be on completely separate hardware, so a virtual machine on an existing ASF system is not an option. Reports from multiple sources indicate that at least two of the major sponsors of ApacheCon 2004/US are withholding payment, which has had a direct effect on the payments to the ASF and to some speakers. The issues are between the sponsors and Security Travel.
Apache Conference Planning report approved as submitted by general consent.
The call for proposals for ApacheCon Europe 2005 opened in January, and to date 41 proposals have been submitted. We should see several upticks as reminders are sent out. The venue for Stuttgart is being provided gratis by the regional government. S&S Verlag is taking responsibility for several graphic design issues and is handling PR in Europe. We have not ruled out the possibility of a U.S. conference in 2005; one thing being considered is to arrange for a one-off contract with a producer who will be able to work with the favourable venue arrangements Security Travel was obtaining, and issuing an RFP for a longer-term repeat contract.
Conferences Committee report approved as submitted by general consent.
6. Special Orders
A board vote was called on whether the board should direct the
ConCom to specifically not use Security Travel for any ApacheCon
conference in 2005. It was noted that this direction could easily
result in no ApacheCon being held, in the US, in 2005. With this
potential result in mind, a roll-call vote was placed:
For the matter of Forbidding the ConCom to Use Security Travel
for any ApacheCon event in the year 2005:
Yea: Ken, Jim, Stefano, Sam, Greg, Sander
Nay:
Abstain: Dirk, Geir.
By a vote of 6 for, none against and 2 abstentions, the vote
was passed and ConCom was so directed.
The concom PMC has discussed what to do about the Security Travel issues. No conclusions have yet been drawn; it has been noted that we either keep Security for 2005 or we probably won't have a show. There are issues around when and how to manage a search with Security still involved (as they are). Virtually all of the expenses have been paid and reimbursements made, but as of this moment Gluecode still hasn't been invoiced for their participation in the exhibit area, and Leo Simons hasn't been reimbursed for his travel (he was on a 'scholarship', being brought to ApacheCon using funds donated for the purpose). I am continuing to pursue these issues with Tina. The CFP for ApacheCon Europe 2005 should open tomorrow (20 January 2005). I am working on the details of our contract with S&S Verlag. There have been no responses on the general concom list to requests for input on ApacheCon issues. Security Travel and S&S Verlag have been requested to provide detailed schedules and deadlines for their various activities leading to the conferences.
In addition to the submitted report, the board again expressed its displeasure with Security Travel. Some board members felt that the "sloppy" way in which ST was operating was doing damage to the ASF. There were 4 main points which the board felt that ST was deficient in:
1. Lack of invoicing. At least one company has reported that they still have not been invoiced. In general, this appears to be ST simply not keeping accurate and sufficient "track" of normal operating paperwork. 2. Not paying speakers. 3. Very bad interaction with Sponsors. Many board members have been contacted privately regarding sponsors' bad experiences with ST. 4. The lack of PR for ApacheCon 2004, which, the board feels, significantly (negatively) impacted the attendence and success of ApacheCon 2004.
For all these reasons, and more, an impromptu Special Order, C, was added to the agenda.
Conference Planning report approve as submitted by general consent.
ApacheCon 2004 US is less than a month away. This year we have more than doubled the number of tutorials being offered, having them on both Saturday and Sunday. Unfortunately, the lateness of publishing the schedule, and some suboptimal tutorial titling, and who knows what other causes, have resulted in registrations being disappointingly low. As of today, there are 245 people registered for the conference. This includes the speakers, however, and so is misleading. Historically, there is an uptick in registrations during the last few weeks before the conference, but I doubt we'll get many more than 500 delegates, if that. For keynote speakers, we have Wil Wheaton opening on Monday, Miguel de Icaza on Tuesday, and Doc Searls closing on Wednesday. There will also be a Sun keynoter, but, as usual, Sun is quite delinquent on providing details. IBM is back as a sponsor, primarily as a result of the Derby submission and IBM's Data Management Systems' marketing department's support. IBM will be sponsoring the Hackathon, and (according to current plans) an interesting contest challenge. The fact that there will be a contest will be broadly announced shortly; the actual terms of the contest will be announced at the opening plenary, submission deadline to be Tuesday evening, and prizes to be awarded during the closing plenary. The top prize is a maximally tricked-out latest-model ThinkPad. The Java Community Process is a sponsor again this year, and in fact they want to sponsor several thousand dollars' worth of 'scholarships.' ApacheCon 2005 Europe is tentatively scheduled for 18 July 2005, in Stuttgart, Germany. We have received requests from Brasil to bring an ApacheCon event there (no surprise, this is not new).
It was noted, for the record, that the ASF does not currently have a written contract with Security Travel regarding ApacheCon 2004. Instead, the ASF has been working under a verbal agreement with ST.
Project Report Approved by General Consent.
o Security Travel has been selected to produce the ApacheCon/US series of conferences for five years; Software and Support Verlag has been chosen to do the next conference in Europe. Contracts for both are being negociated. o The Call for Participation has been sent out; fifty two (52) submissions have been received to date. o We are working with OSCOM to provide content for the ApacheTracks streams there. We will be holding the scheduling meeting for ApacheCon 2004/US around 7 August 2004.
Approved by General Consent.
o Security Travel has been selected to produce the ApacheCon/US series of conferences for five years; Software and Support Verlag has been chosen to do the next conference in Europe. Contracts for both are being negociated. o The Call for Participation has been sent out; fifty two (52) submissions have been received to date. o We are working with OSCOM to provide content for the ApacheTracks streams there. We will be holding the scheduling meeting for ApacheCon 2004/US around 7 August 2004.
No report received or submitted.
[ no attachment ]
Ken reported that due to small projected attendence to some tutorials, they would either be cancelled or the amount paid to the speakers would be reduced.
There is no Attachment C.
Ken reported on the growing frustration with Security Travel. Feedback on the conference itself has been favorable, yet Security's responsiveness on post-conference details has been less than acceptable at times. Preliminary results indicate that ApacheCon 2002 may not show a profit.
There was a discussion on whether the mandate for the conferences
committee should be limited to a two-year term, but an amendment to
that effect was put to vote and was not approved, with two yea votes
(Brian, Dirk), four nay votes (Roy, Rasmus, Ken, Ben), and one
abstention (Doug).
The following resolution was approved by vote of the directors
present, with six yea votes (Brian, Ken, Roy, Ben, Rasmus, Doug),
one nay vote (Dirk), and no abstentions.
BE IT RESOLVED, that the Conferences Committee is hereby tasked
with the responsibility, and empowered with the authority, to act
on behalf of the Foundation and in the Foundation's best interests
in all matters involving Foundation production, sponsorship, or
participation in conferences, exhibitions, or trade shows.