Last Thursday CollabNet sponsored a Subversion Meetup at ApacheCon in Atlanta. The attendees were: Jack, Mike, me, Greg, Bob Jenkins and one other fellow who was interested in deploying Subversion as a ClearCase replacement. While it was a good chance to talk shop with Mike and Greg, I'm kind of disappointed that there weren't any more "investigators" present.
Upon further discussion, Mike and I came to the conclusion that an event such as ApacheCon isn't the right venue for an evangelistic meeting. In addition, holding events focused just on Subversion, while useful (witness: elego's Subversion Day, WANdisco's Subversion Live!, etc.), are mainly targeted at the folks who are already committed to Subversion. People looking at switching probably aren't going to go through the hassle to attend a single-topic event like those. One of the ideas we had was having meetup-type events in conjunction with other conferences/events where the target audience already is already there. In other words, taking the message to the people, rather than requiring them to come to us. My question: do we need to do this? Is there a niche that isn't being filled by the various corporate sponsors, which we (as a Subversion development community) are better served to do? Do people already know "enough" about Subversion, such that we don't need to evangelize anymore? -Hyrum
