CAREFUL: This mail was posted to lists with different visibility levels.
I would love to see any discussion following it happen in public. While
I'm subscribed to a few of our events lists, I would assume many people
at Apache aren't which is why IMHO dev@c.a.o might be a good place to
take this proposal apart.
Hi,
TL;DR: Back when I created Berlin Buzzwords I did so to have an excuse
to invite lovely people from all over the world to visit Berlin. It took
until last week for me to ask some people outside of the NoSQL/ search/
big data circles what I would have to do to get them to travel to
Berlin. The answer I got? "Just ask" - So here I am.
Longer version (I know I'll regret thinking about this a second after
hitting send):
Looking in vain for an existing group of people to exchange ideas around
the topic of distributed team management across organisation boundaries,
last summer I started organising http://achnee.wordpress.com - "async
cat herding" meetup for exactly this topic. I've scheduled it at lunch
time, received lots of interest, but for one talk at a time usually
attracted only roughly 20 attendees.
Ever since I started that thing my head has been tossing around the idea
to see if one could arrange something bigger. Something that touches
community management, open development, inner source, project
neutrality, foundation growth, async communication - essentially some
sort of Apache Community Summit, or Apache Community Hackathon to
overload the meetup acronym's meaning.
I started working for a new employer (Europace.de, fintech founded in
1999, meetup friendly, organised holocratically***) as "Open Source
Strategist"*. Shortly after starting there a colleague (Stefan, CC'ed)
told me that this company has space for 180ppl total at no cost (2
rooms, one of which can be split, so it's 3 rooms max). This information
got me thinking, the result of that thinking made Stefan "slightly"
nervous ;) However that same result also made a handful of ASF
affiliated people smile when I shared it with them, so I thought it
would make sense to take the idea one step further:
With this mail I would like to see how much interest there would be in
attending an event that is solely about Apache project leadership topics.
If there's only <20 ppl, I'm happy to offer my family's living room,
been there, done that before - promise to keep the 3D printer switched
off this time around.
If there's <70ppl, we can easily host this in the Europace Casino meetup
room, no big deal, there's plenty of experience in how to do that there
including one video recording set should we be inclined to record any talks.
For the case that there's <200ppl interested, we will need some
organisation time up-front, but I have been told that we would be welcome.
If more than 200ppl attend, I'd have to get creative.
Up until 200ppl I'd keep the event free as in free beer to everyone who
contributed to Apache and hand out tickets on a first come first serve
basis. Free as in free beer means no first class catering, no
reimbursement for speakers, no fancy conference hotel to spend all your
conference days in. However Europace.de is located close to Berlin
Alexanderplatz - you won't starve for a lack of food. Nor will you get
bored if you need some fresh air, happy to share local knowledge on what
to do, where to eat, what to see ;)
Apart from number of attendees there are a couple open questions I'm
aware of:
- In terms of topics I would love to focus on developer
collaboration, Apache Way, Community leadership, distributed teams**. If
we want organised tracks, I'd need speakers. For a first iteration I
won't setup a double blind submission and review system and instead keep
things as simple as possible which implies a good chance of unfairness.
- For marketing I would love to bring this to the Berlin Buzzwords team,
I can talk to German publishers, would rely on Apache channels for
everything else.
- Should someone want professional videos and want to pay for that I can
see if I can get you in touch with the ppl who have done this in the
past at Buzzwords, if not, maybe Google Live Hangouts could be an option
(have done this for the past two achnee meetups, worked ok-ish, depends
on bandwidth).
- I have no idea wrt. to pricing - to avoid contractual obligations, tax
implications and personal liability stuff I'd shoot for minimising
number of signed contracts/ money collected with the caveat that people
would have to be honest in giving back tickets they don't need (which
currently doesn't work with meetup.com organised events here in Berlin).
I've had crowdfunding suggested before - yes, this is an option, if we
find or create an intermediate entity to collect and wisely spend the
money that is not me - otherwise among other things my tax declaration
get's even more complicated than it already is, and no I won't be the
one creating an e.V. for that myself for the same reasons that I didn't
do that back when Berlin Buzzwords was founded: I'm not a paperwork
loving person, sorry.
If you are interested in all of this, I have prepared a short poll for you:
https://goo.gl/forms/XOceZSt8byzSD8ac2
Cheers,
Isabel (about to regret having hit send in a minute, not proof reading
as otherwise I won't send this out...)
* If any of you have any good advise on where/ how to start and which
pitfalls to avoid, lets talk separately.
** Mostly out of personal interest and because I'm frustrated that for
me it seems easier to find such content by anyone but the Apache
Software Foundation, but maybe that's my personal filter bubble.
*** Press teaser adapted, shortened and translated from the official
German version: Hypoport AG is a FinTech service provider in the
financial industry. The business model is based on a portfolio of
institutional customers, private clients, financial services companies.
Europace AG is a 100% subsidiary of Hypoport, developing and operating
an online financial market place called Europace, the largest German
platform for real estate financing, building loan products, and advise
credit products. Europace is connecting roughly 400 partners - banks,
insurances, financial sales institutions. Several thousand users are
handling roughly 35k transactions each month with a volumn of about 4
billion Euro via the Europace platform.
.oO(I'm wondering if anyone really reads until down here...)
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