On 09/11/2012 Rob Weir wrote:
On a scale of 1-5, where 1 is lowest and 5 is highest, how effective was attending ApacheCon EU to you for each of the following:
Here come my answers, and indeed I think this is a useful initiative. I'll give a bit of context in addition to the 1-5 assessment.
A. Meeting other AOO project members
5 (most of us were meeting in person for the first time, or just recall that we had seen each other at some ancient OOoCon).
B. Gaining new information about AOO from the formal presentations.
4 (the conference exposed work, for example by Multiracio or CS2C, that is ongoing but has not been widely publicized so far).
C. Gaining new information about AOO from informal discussions with project members.
4 (in the end, informal discussions are the real reason to attend a conference in person; for sessions, we will have slides + audio/video of all sessions online reasonably soon)
D. Gaining new AOO users
2 (this was a high-level, paid conference where attendees already knew about OpenOffice; FOSDEM will not be much different; note, however, that the materials we posted were seen by more people than those attending the sessions, so there could be some indirect effect not captured here)
E. Recruiting new potential project members
3 (but especially people from other Apache projects; FOSDEM here would probably be different).
F. Educating others about AOO
4 (this is a surprise; but indeed even some speakers did not have a clear understanding of the project, and being all in a team was a tremendously effective way to bring them up-to-date).
G. Learning more about other Apache projects
3 (this is personal, others will have different evaluations; in my case the original plans were to have more interactions with other projects and attend some "community" talks -which I'll anyway make up for by watching the recordings- but this was also the first meeting for the OpenOffice community and we had many internal things to discuss; fortunately, our developers had the time for some technical talks with other projects, which is very good; in my case, interaction with other Apache people was great but informal - read: nights out, beers...).
H. Moving AOO project plans and/or technical decisions forward.
5 (even though no decisions were taken, there were a number of useful suggestions, that will become discussion topics for this list in the coming weeks)
Regards, Andrea.
