Dennis is right. We have to be realistic about providing value to our speakers I'd e want to go beyond highly specific Apache Project sessions. For example, one of my own sessions, a lab, has drawn a comment about potentially being a sales pitch.
This is ridiculous. It's a lab in which people will build VMs for easy consumption of open source projects using platform independent DevOps tools. The abstract mentions Azure because Microsoft will pay my expenses and we make it run somewhere. I'm hardly going to demo it on a competing platform am I? Although the abstract invites folks to join us and push the VMs to other platforms. Oh, and the service offered to host these things, if a project wants to do so, is free of any charge, as is the Azure account needed to make use of the service. For those who want to go elsewhere the VM is Linux based and the resulting solution will also build VMs for other clouds and hypervisors. I even mention this in the abstract. Add to that my reputation here and what the foundation will do to me if I do a sales pitch. If I'm not immune to such accusations then a newcomer certainly isn't. Ironically, the presentation session on the same topic has been marked accept by the same reviewer. It doesn't mention Azure specifically. It's not necessary to do so since I'll be demoing rather than helping people actually do the work, so it shouldn't affect folks. If id not mentioned Azure and I stead focused on cross-platform alone I bet the comment would not have been made. I hope reviewers will focus on the value of the content to the breadth of attendees. I believe my session is valuable to every project in the ASF and beyond. If we want to grow the conference we need to grow ourselves first. Sent from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Dennis E. Hamilton<mailto:dennis.hamil...@acm.org> Sent: 2/3/2015 8:44 AM To: dev@community.apache.org<mailto:dev@community.apache.org> Subject: RE: ApacheCon NA CFP closed -- replying below to -- From: jan i [mailto:j...@apache.org] Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2015 01:12 To: dev@community.apache.org Subject: Re: ApacheCon NA CFP closed On Monday, February 2, 2015, Ross Gardler (MS OPEN TECH) < ross.gard...@microsoft.com> wrote: [ ... ] > Ross: "Hey, you know you are doing cool stuff, you should consider > submitting a talk at ApacheCon" > > A.N.Other: "Isn't that just for Apache people though" > > Ross: "Traditionally, yes. But we are trying to make it much broader than > that. Apache is about producing open source software, so anything open > source related is a potential fit. Anything that uses ASF software, like > your work, is a really good fit" [ ... ] We should really make that clear to people, I strongly believe the general opinion is non-project talks are not welcome. I base this on the fact that a number of talks for Denver and Budapest was rejected for being too company like. <orcmid> Are there ways to have talks that are not ASF-project centric yet do not become company-centric instead? What about lessons learned, important practices, and maybe results of studies, whether from analysts or academic sources? If the only mention of a company in terms of its brand and products is confined to the logo on the slide pages, and affiliation of the author, might that work? Here are examples of situations that would get me into the room: Someone from Google describing their fire-drill system and an actual situation of a fail-over somewhere on the planet and all that happens to restore services. (I loved a past report when a fail-over happened while fire-drilling was underway.) Someone handling a serious DOS attack and how a defense-in-depth technique caught a penetration that was under-cover of that attack (making one up that might not make actual sense). A study of how many-eyes does or does not show up on an open- source project and what the factors seem to be would be one too. </orcmid> [ ... ]
