On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 04:47:07PM -0400, David Nalley wrote:
Hi Quaid,
So I have been thinking about this from both a conference perspective
and a Fedora perspective, and I think my reaction depends on what you
want to achieve.
I'm glad you've had a chance to ruminate on it. :)
If you want to achieve a 'cloud' section of FUDcon I think
this will
work well. If you are thinking of eventually spinning off CUDcon into
it's own independent conference I think it will work contrary to your
long term goals. Fedora, while awesome, and dear to my heart, is
likely to be pretty polarizing 'parent' to the conference. Both FUDcon
and JUDcon are pretty project-specific, and while there is always
tangential material, it's always been focused. So for instance there
are certain cloud projects that have targeted certain distributions
that aren't Fedora for one reason or another - how welcome are they
going to feel? There's also going to be the perception that this is
RHT's conference, and since essentially RHT is a competitor in the
cloud space with other cloud projects I fear many of them will feel
it's pointless to show up, or that they aren't welcome. (After all,
would we send someone to UDS to talk about how awesome Fedora 16 with
Gnome 3 is?)
I guess I just don't know the real facts on how people feel and
think, so I don't really know where to position these ideas:
1. Neutral-ground open source cloud conference that doesn't take
itself too seriously.
2. Provides value of getting things done rather than all the vendors
getting together to talk at each other for three days. Unconference
and hackathon, which benefits from the sort of upstream experience
available at a typical FUDCon.
3. Grows itself not to the detriment of other conferences because it
solves a problem otherwise unsolved, and so brings value to
whatever other events it might be paired with.
I mean, if there is a neutral-ground open source cloud conference I
should be focusing on, maybe that's a better idea for this energy?
We've also all experienced the problems that come with just
tacking on
events to conferences. If they are done before or after the conference
they seem to work well. If they run parallel one of two things happen:
1. The draw to the add-on is so great it hurts the conference itself,
or 2. The main conference is so captivating that no one shows up for
the add-on.
Are those the only optional results? Or the most likely?
I'll claim being inexperienced here. I have seen it both work and not
work, depending.
I like the idea of a CUDcon - but if it were me (and it clearly
isn't,
I am doing no work on this.) I think I'd shoot for a standalone
conference, once a year, and before it's even announced I'd get some
significant buy in from the folks at places like Gluster, Euca,
OpenStack, Ceph(Dreamhost), CloudFoundry, etc, so that they will show
up and participate.) To my knowledge there's no cloud-focused open
source conference, and it's a niche that done right should draw lots
of folks.
OK, thanks, that's definitely one of the potential solutions.
- Karsten
--
name: Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team: Red Hat Community Architecture & Leadership
uri:
http://communityleadershipteam.org
http://TheOpenSourceWay.org
gpg: AD0E0C41