Some notes on ASF conferences.

[Claude Warren]

I originally posted the content of this note in two different slack
conversations.  I have decided to combine them and place them on the
mailing list for wider distribution.

I believe that there are two issues that are retarding the acceptance of
ASF produced conferences

   - The name
   - The positioning

The name is an issue.  You tell a potential sponsor or attendee or other
interested party that you are working on a "Community over Code" conference
and there is a blank look.  You have to tell them it is the ASF conference
that replaces ApacheCon.  Then they may be interested, but often you will
hear something like "I'm looking for technical conferences, not community
building".  If you then follow up with: "This is the technical ASF
conference",  perhaps they will come.  But you have already had to clear
two hurdles.  How many potential sponsors or attendees didn't ask questions
at the first hurdle and decided Community over Code was not for them?  How
many left at the second hurdle because they thought it was a community
building focused conference. (Some will argue that all conferences are
community building).  So before you get a chance to tell them what a great
conference it will be, an unknown number of people and organizations have
turned away.  I don't know how to measure that loss but I suspect that it
is large.  Renaming the conference to "The ASFConference" or "ASFCon" would
go a long way to mitigating this problem.

The positioning is an issue.

There are lots of conferences that talk about specific ASF projects and the
"best" ways to configure and run the tools -- These are end user focused
conferences and often come with names that include the word "Summit", or
for smaller conferences "Meetup".

There are a fair number of conferences that discuss software development at
the "gnats eyeball level" (e.g. https://algo-conference.org/2024/)

There are very few conferences that discuss medium level developments that
may be applicable across projects.

I found that ApacheCon (I have not attended a C/C NA) felt like a
collection of siloed conferences. If there were 15 tracks it could just as
easily have been 15 meetups.  It felt to me that there was very little
cross pollination.

I feel that if the ASF Conference is to retain its relevance it needs to
focus on being a developer first conference that emphasizes application
blocks that can be used across projects.  To do this would require an
approach that is orthogonal to the way we have always done it.  To whit no
more project specific topics but topics that are of interest to multiple
projects: not groovy, or cassandra, or kafka; but JVM language scripting,
cluster consensus strategies, and streaming data strategies.

Become the conference that developers want to attend because they are going
to learn something that will be applicable across the projects and products
they work on.  Be the conference that employers will send employees to
because those employees return as better developers.

Note: I speak of developers but I include all contributor categories like
documentation specialists, testing specialists, graphic designers, etc, in
that category.  Basically anybody that contributes to the development of a
project.

In terms of funding, I think there are lessons to be learned from Sci-Fi
and comics and other fandom based conferences.  You don't have to charge a
lot at the door.  For example MileHiCon a large literary science fiction
conference in Denver is currently charging $54 for ages 12 and up, free for
11 and under for all three days.  You don't have to have large scale
sponsors.  When I worked on  MileHiCon the funding came from selling
"vendor tables".  Currently those go for $125 - $375 (see
https://milehicon.org/perennial-fixtures/vendors-room/).  If the ASF can
produce a conference that small scale vendors want to attend, the vendor
space will sell out.

The ASF conference should become the place where developers want to go to
learn stuff, where employers want to send employees because they will
return with new ideas and better approaches to problems, and where vendors
of tools for developers want to be.  I think it is possible, but not if the
conference continues to compete with large scale siloed "Summit"
conferences.

Claude

Re: Some notes on ASF conferences.

[Francois Papon]

Hi,

+1 for the name, ASFCon seems to well fit as we want to rebrand Apache 
to ASF so it make sense to have ASFCon instead of ApacheCon. People will 
not be lost.


For the positioning, I think that having a mix with how an opensource 
community is working and some technical talks related to ASF projects 
can be a good fit.


regards,

François

On 10/06/2024 13:20, Claude Warren wrote:

I originally posted the content of this note in two different slack
conversations.  I have decided to combine them and place them on the
mailing list for wider distribution.

I believe that there are two issues that are retarding the acceptance of
ASF produced conferences

- The name
- The positioning

The name is an issue.  You tell a potential sponsor or attendee or other
interested party that you are working on a "Community over Code" conference
and there is a blank look.  You have to tell them it is the ASF conference
that replaces ApacheCon.  Then they may be interested, but often you will
hear something like "I'm looking for technical conferences, not community
building".  If you then follow up with: "This is the technical ASF
conference",  perhaps they will come.  But you have already had to clear
two hurdles.  How many potential sponsors or attendees didn't ask questions
at the first hurdle and decided Community over Code was not for them?  How
many left at the second hurdle because they thought it was a community
building focused conference. (Some will argue that all conferences are
community building).  So before you get a chance to tell them what a great
conference it will be, an unknown number of people and organizations have
turned away.  I don't know how to measure that loss but I suspect that it
is large.  Renaming the conference to "The ASFConference" or "ASFCon" would
go a long way to mitigating this problem.

The positioning is an issue.

There are lots of conferences that talk about specific ASF projects and the
"best" ways to configure and run the tools -- These are end user focused
conferences and often come with names that include the word "Summit", or
for smaller conferences "Meetup".

There are a fair number of conferences that discuss software development at
the "gnats eyeball level" (e.g. https://algo-conference.org/2024/)

There are very few conferences that discuss medium level developments that
may be applicable across projects.

I found that ApacheCon (I have not attended a C/C NA) felt like a
collection of siloed conferences. If there were 15 tracks it could just as
easily have been 15 meetups.  It felt to me that there was very little
cross pollination.

I feel that if the ASF Conference is to retain its relevance it needs to
focus on being a developer first conference that emphasizes application
blocks that can be used across projects.  To do this would require an
approach that is orthogonal to the way we have always done it.  To whit no
more project specific topics but topics that are of interest to multiple
projects: not groovy, or cassandra, or kafka; but JVM language scripting,
cluster consensus strategies, and streaming data strategies.

Become the conference that developers want to attend because they are going
to learn something that will be applicable across the projects and products
they work on.  Be the conference that employers will send employees to
because those employees return as better developers.

Note: I speak of developers but I include all contributor categories like
documentation specialists, testing specialists, graphic designers, etc, in
that category.  Basically anybody that contributes to the development of a
project.

In terms of funding, I think there are lessons to be learned from Sci-Fi
and comics and other fandom based conferences.  You don't have to charge a
lot at the door.  For example MileHiCon a large literary science fiction
conference in Denver is currently charging $54 for ages 12 and up, free for
11 and under for all three days.  You don't have to have large scale
sponsors.  When I worked on  MileHiCon the funding came from selling
"vendor tables".  Currently those go for $125 - $375 (see
https://milehicon.org/perennial-fixtures/vendors-room/).  If the ASF can
produce a conference that small scale vendors want to attend, the vendor
space will sell out.

The ASF conference should become the place where developers want to go to
learn stuff, where employers want to send employees because they will
return with new ideas and better approaches to problems, and where vendors
of tools for developers want to be.  I think it is possible, but not if the
conference continues to compete with large scale siloed "Summit"
conferences.

Claude



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Re: Some notes on ASF conferences.

[Ivet Petrova]

Hi Claude,

I want to share a few thoughts, hopefully they will be useful. Please, find my 
comments below:

Best regards,



Marketing Director
ivet.petr...@shapeblue.com
www.shapeblue.com
 
 

On 10 Jun 2024, at 14:20, Claude Warren  wrote:

I originally posted the content of this note in two different slack
conversations.  I have decided to combine them and place them on the
mailing list for wider distribution.

I believe that there are two issues that are retarding the acceptance of
ASF produced conferences

  - The name
  - The positioning

The name is an issue.  You tell a potential sponsor or attendee or other
interested party that you are working on a "Community over Code" conference
and there is a blank look.  You have to tell them it is the ASF conference
that replaces ApacheCon.  Then they may be interested, but often you will
hear something like "I'm looking for technical conferences, not community
building".  If you then follow up with: "This is the technical ASF
conference",  perhaps they will come.  But you have already had to clear
two hurdles.  How many potential sponsors or attendees didn't ask questions
at the first hurdle and decided Community over Code was not for them?  How
many left at the second hurdle because they thought it was a community
building focused conference. (Some will argue that all conferences are
community building).  So before you get a chance to tell them what a great
conference it will be, an unknown number of people and organizations have
turned away.  I don't know how to measure that loss but I suspect that it
is large.  Renaming the conference to "The ASFConference" or "ASFCon" would
go a long way to mitigating this problem.

The positioning is an issue.
I believe CoC is bringing a lot of confusion. People were used to ApacheCon and 
the Apache brand is well-recognised. I am not sure what caused the change, but 
when people hear CoC they just do not associate it with Apache and ApacheCon.
I can give a very good example. I suppose many EU-based people remember World 
Hosting Days event. At some point, after maybe 10 years, this was renamed to 
CloudFest. The new name correctly presented the transition of the whole world 
from hosting/shared hosting and domain names, to cloud and virtualisation. This 
was a good transitioning and caused 0 problems for sponsors, attendees and 
organisers.

With Community over Code - I see several issues:
- not associated with Apache
- not visible it is tech event
- not something which people can associate with technology a lot, thus lower 
number of visitors

Other example - Open Stack Summit, was renamed to OpenInfra Summit. Again a 
good example how to target more visitors, as it sounds broad and focused on 
multiple open-source projects. Although it is still heavily OpenStack.

I believe it worths to put some thinking over the event name and how to 
position it.

Initial ideas - Open Infra Days/ Open-source Dev Summit/ Apache Dev summit … 
just what first came to my mind.
I believe having Apache in the name is a must.
Maybe from Apache Con to Apache Dev Summit or similar...


There are lots of conferences that talk about specific ASF projects and the
"best" ways to configure and run the tools -- These are end user focused
conferences and often come with names that include the word "Summit", or
for smaller conferences "Meetup".

There are a fair number of conferences that discuss software development at
the "gnats eyeball level" (e.g. https://algo-conference.org/2024/)

There are very few conferences that discuss medium level developments that
may be applicable across projects.

I found that ApacheCon (I have not attended a C/C NA) felt like a
collection of siloed conferences. If there were 15 tracks it could just as
easily have been 15 meetups.  It felt to me that there was very little
cross pollination.

I feel that if the ASF Conference is to retain its relevance it needs to
focus on being a developer first conference that emphasizes application
blocks that can be used across projects.  To do this would require an
approach that is orthogonal to the way we have always done it.  To whit no
more project specific topics but topics that are of interest to multiple
projects: not groovy, or cassandra, or kafka; but JVM language scripting,
cluster consensus strategies, and streaming data strategies.

I agree with you. One of the things I saw at the Bratislava event is that 
people were there just for specific projects. And there was not option to 
interact with other projects. I think, that if the talks can be more broader, 
this will attract more people and sponsors.

Become the conference that developers want to attend because they are going
to learn something that will be applicable across the projects and products
they work on.  Be the conference that employers will send employees to
because those employees return as better developers.

If the event is focused on developers only, this will change also the profile 
os sponsors. I b

Re: Some notes on ASF conferences.

[Martin Desruisseaux]

Le 2024-06-10 à 13 h 52, Ivet Petrova a écrit :

One of the things I saw at the Bratislava event is that people were 
there just for specific projects. And there was not option to interact 
with other projects.


What about organizing code sprints during the event? Something like 
"integrate project Apache Foo into project Apache Bar (e.g. as an 
extension)" with developers from at least 2 projects in each code 
sprint. Maybe with some insensitive for developers to participate to 
code sprints (e.g., reduced fees) and a short presentation of the 
progress made at the end of each day, e.g. in a dedicated talk session.


    Martin



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Re: Some notes on ASF conferences.

[Rich Bowen]

> On Jun 10, 2024, at 8:14 AM, Martin Desruisseaux 
>  wrote:
> 
> Le 2024-06-10 à 13 h 52, Ivet Petrova a écrit :
> 
>> One of the things I saw at the Bratislava event is that people were there 
>> just for specific projects. And there was not option to interact with other 
>> projects.
>> 
> What about organizing code sprints during the event? Something like 
> "integrate project Apache Foo into project Apache Bar (e.g. as an extension)" 
> with developers from at least 2 projects in each code sprint. Maybe with some 
> insensitive for developers to participate to code sprints (e.g., reduced 
> fees) and a short presentation of the progress made at the end of each day, 
> e.g. in a dedicated talk session.


Yes. We generally call that the “Hackathon”, and provide space for it.

The key word in your note, though, is “organizing.” Someone has to do that. And 
over the years fewer and fewer people have showed up to do that work, until the 
last couple of times we tried this, the space sat almost entirely empty. That 
said, I still think it’s an *amazing* idea, and something that we should keep 
trying.


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Re: Some notes on ASF conferences.

[Ivet Petrova]

If it is not in the agenda and there is nothing announced in advance, people 
just do not self-organise.
This is my experience.
Or somebody just need to shout at place about the hackathon.



Best regards,



Marketing Director
ivet.petr...@shapeblue.com
www.shapeblue.com
 
 

On 10 Jun 2024, at 15:36, Rich Bowen  wrote:


On Jun 10, 2024, at 8:14 AM, Martin Desruisseaux 
 wrote:

Le 2024-06-10 à 13 h 52, Ivet Petrova a écrit :

One of the things I saw at the Bratislava event is that people were there just 
for specific projects. And there was not option to interact with other projects.

What about organizing code sprints during the event? Something like "integrate 
project Apache Foo into project Apache Bar (e.g. as an extension)" with 
developers from at least 2 projects in each code sprint. Maybe with some 
insensitive for developers to participate to code sprints (e.g., reduced fees) 
and a short presentation of the progress made at the end of each day, e.g. in a 
dedicated talk session.


Yes. We generally call that the “Hackathon”, and provide space for it.

The key word in your note, though, is “organizing.” Someone has to do that. And 
over the years fewer and fewer people have showed up to do that work, until the 
last couple of times we tried this, the space sat almost entirely empty. That 
said, I still think it’s an *amazing* idea, and something that we should keep 
trying.


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[WG: Code of conduct] Proposal

[Rich Bowen]

Hi, folks,

At our board face-to-face meeting in Bratislava last weekend, the topic of a 
code of conduct was raised. Without getting into all of the historical 
confusion around our code of conduct, I have a proposal for a working group:

TL;DR:

We should create a recommended template Code of Conduct that projects could 
tweak and adopt.

Background:

Many ASF projects do not have a code of conduct, and push this up to the 
Foundation. This mostly seems to work, in practice, most of the time, but the 
public *perception* is just that they don’t have one. Meanwhile, the ASF Code 
of Conduct - https://apache.org/foundation/policies/conduct.html - lacks a 
specific escalation path, and doesn’t leave room for project-specific processes.

Proposal:

The Code of Conduct working group will be a outcome-focused[1] effort to start 
with the Contributor Covenant V 2.1 [2] and turn it into a template which ASF 
project could adopt as-is, or make small tweaks to for their specific project. 
This task consists of several steps:

0) Create a section under https://github.com/apache/comdev-working-groups 

1) Edit the CCv2.1 to put ASF-specific language in (PMC, Project, Board, etc)

2) Identify sections that need to be updated/altered to reflect the ASF way of 
doing things. Eg, Clarify the Scope section for ASF norms, and work out the 
escalation path for when/if a project wishes to escalate a complaint to the 
Foundation. (Which would require understanding and working with the existing 
process, so that we are not creating new work for the folks that already do 
that work.)

3) Run it by a few projects and see what they think

4) Provide it as a template on community.apache.org 
 as a proposed/suggested template.

What this isn’t:

This is NOT an effort to create a committee that would impose and/or enforce 
community of codes on various projects, or at the Foundation level. Any effort 
to turn it into that will be … unpopular. To say the least.

Next steps:

If anyone is interested in doing this work with me, please jump in and get 
started. I do plan to spend some time on this in the coming weeks, but won’t 
have time to get started on it until next week at the very earliest. But don’t 
feel that you have to wait for me if you are interested in the topic.

—Rich

[1] By outcome-focused, what I mean is that it has a specific task, which, upon 
completion, the WG would dissolve 

[2] 
https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/1/code_of_conduct/code_of_conduct.md

— 
Rich Bowen
rbo...@rcbowen.com

Re: Some notes on ASF conferences.

[Jim Jagielski]

> On Jun 10, 2024, at 7:20 AM, Claude Warren  wrote:
> 
> I originally posted the content of this note in two different slack
> conversations.  I have decided to combine them and place them on the
> mailing list for wider distribution.
> 
> I believe that there are two issues that are retarding the acceptance of
> ASF produced conferences
> 
>   - The name
>   - The positioning
> 
> The name is an issue.  You tell a potential sponsor or attendee or other
> interested party that you are working on a "Community over Code" conference
> and there is a blank look.  You have to tell them it is the ASF conference
> that replaces ApacheCon.

If you go to https://communityovercode.org/ it mentions the ASF but there are 2 
issues with that:

  1. Even though we are trying to rebrand as "The ASF", it is still not widely 
known. So noting that CoC is the ASF conference really doesn't provide any real 
useful info

  2. I could not find anywhere even a side note that said "CoC was formerly 
known as 'ApacheCon'" or anything similar.

Cheers!