On 03/02/2015 01:11, "jan i" <j...@apache.org> wrote: >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.
Having been a reviewer for both last years events I would say that the issue was not that there were talks that were too company like but that there were some talks that looked to be pure product pitches which as I understood it was not the style of content desired. Talks from an enterprise/company perspective e.g. use cases, implementation and deployment experiences, integration efforts, how to adopt Apache Foo, how Apache Bar can save you money etc. are great and exactly the kind of content we want to attract a wider non-Apache audience and are most certainly welcome but relatively few of these actually get submitted. This is partly because the CFP is primarily marketed within the ASF where people have an understanding that they participate as individuals and not as companies so people tend to submit talks about the ASF and its projects. However talks that are just product pitches i.e. here's our commercial product we built with all this open source and now want to sell you are the types of talks that shift ApacheCon from being a technical conference to being a business/marketing conference which kinda jars with the goals of the ASF. So however it gets marketed in future we need to strike the right balance such that we don't turn it into just another marketing conference while finding ways to attract a broader audience Rob
