On 02/07/2016 02:07 PM, Jay Pipes wrote:
Hello all,
tl;dr
=====
I have long thought that the OpenStack Summits have become too
commercial and provide little value to the software engineers
contributing to OpenStack.
I propose the following:
1) Separate the design summits from the conferences
2) Hold only a single OpenStack conference per year
3) Return the design summit to being a low-key, low-cost working event
details
=======
The design summits originally started out as working events. Developers
got together in smallish rooms, arranged chairs in a fishbowl, and got
to work planning and designing.
With the OpenStack Summit growing more and more marketing- and
sales-focused, the contributors attending the design summit are often
unfocused. The precious little time that developers have to actually
work on the next release planning is often interrupted or cut short by
the large numbers of "suits" and salespeople at the conference event,
many of which are peddling a product or pushing a corporate agenda.
Many contributors submit talks to speak at the conference part of an
OpenStack Summit because their company says it's the only way they will
pay for them to attend the design summit. This is, IMHO, a terrible
thing. The design summit is a *working* event. Companies that contribute
to OpenStack projects should send their engineers to working events
because that is where work is done, not so that their engineer can go
give a talk about some vendor's agenda-item or newfangled product.
Part of the reason that companies only send engineers who are giving a
talk at the conference side is that the cost of attending the OpenStack
Summit has become ludicrously expensive. Why have the events become so
expensive? I can think of a few reasons:
a) They are held every six months. I know of no other community or open
source project that holds *conference-type* events every six months.
b) They are held in extremely expensive hotels and conference centers
because the number of attendees is so big.
c) Because the conferences have become sales and marketing-focused
events, companies shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for schwag,
for rented event people, for food and beverage sponsorships, for keynote
slots, for lavish and often ridiculous parties, and more. This cost
means less money to send engineers to the design summit to do actual work.
I would love to see the OpenStack contributor community take back the
design summit to its original format and purpose and decouple it from
the OpenStack Summit's conference portion.
I believe the design summits should be organized by the OpenStack
contributor community, not the OpenStack Foundation and its marketing
and event planning staff. This will allow lower-cost venues to be chosen
that meet the needs only of the small group of active contributors, not
of huge masses of conference attendees. This will allow contributor
companies to send *more* engineers to *more* design summits, which is
something that really needs to happen if we are to grow our active
contributor pool.
Once this decoupling occurs, I think that the OpenStack Summit should be
renamed to the OpenStack Conference and Expo to better fit its purpose
and focus. This Conference and Expo event really should be held once a
year, in my opinion, and continue to be run by the OpenStack Foundation.
I, for one, would welcome events that have no conference check-in area,
no evening parties with 2000 people, no keynote and
powerpoint-as-a-service sessions, and no getting pulled into sales
meetings.
OK, there, I said it.
Thoughts? Criticism? Support? Suggestions welcome.
I agree with the overall suggestion. I have a few additional thoughts.
First - so that nobody thinks we're saying negative things- I think that
the Foundation Staff has done an amazing job in running these events so
far. That we've gotten to the point where this conversation is useful is
a testament to how well they've done their job. I'd like to make sure
that the tone of "take it back" doesn't become 'tech folks vs.
foundation staff' thing - but rather framing the problem as to being
able to distribute some of the burden so that they can focus on the big
hoopla events. I expect we'll still need their involvement even if the
design summit turned into a complete grass-roots thing. Making sure all
of the things we do are collaborations is key.
Second - what is now the Ops Mid-cycle is much better suited to be
co-located with the Conference and Expo. The people who are selling
products and the people who are running clouds are much more naturally
aligned (running a cloud? try buying our $insert-product-here which
makes your cloud awesome) than the Conference is with the Design Summit.
Third - the one thing where I disagree slightly - I think two-a-year is
fine by me given the alternating US / non-US nature of things. Having a
conference in the US every other year would be not enough, and excluding
our non-US friends from the party seems also a bit much. That said -
again to your point above, if this is an actual customer/user event then
our companies do not need to send hundreds of devs to the semi-annual
alternating event and the normal economics of event budgets can totally
come in to play. Also, the "parties" can be customer events like they
are at other events, rather than needing to feel inclusive of a sea of
2000 developers - many of whom are tired and would prefer to stop going
to parties and would rather sit around and talk about the hard technical
problems.
Fourth - I agree about having it be tech-community organized. I
specifically suggest a model similar to how DebConf, Linux Conf
Australia and PyCon operate - where teams in cities put in bids to the
community to host the event. LCA usually gets hosted on a University
campus somewhere. (guess who can easily handle 2000 developers wifi
needs? Universities who are normally filled with thousands of youngsters
with a billion wifi enabled devices, that's who)
Fifth - if we do this, the real need for the mid-cycles we currently
have probably goes away since the summit week can be a legit
wall-to-wall work week.
Sixth - there is a logistical issue of design summit tied to release
schedule which is tied to venue rentals which are planed a decent amount
out because of size. If we want to decouple, we're likely going to have
to have either a single short or a single long release cycle so that we
can shift the release calendar to be offset from the conferences. I
would personally suggest a single short cycle. Know how people keep
talking about a no-features cycle? How about if we did that, but did it
over a 3-month release? In any case, if we did this - it would also mean
that the conference could actually be a place where people could talk
about the latest release and what problems they've solved / how to use
the new features in it - rather than people mainly talking about the
previous release because it's the only thing they've had time to use.
Seventh - my biggest concern is something James Bottomley said in an
email after I started writing this long thing ... that without the
'draw' of the conference part, we lose key people from being able to
come. That said - we have people travelling to mid-cycles without
conferences currently - if the ask for devs goes from 4 events a year to
2 events a year, maybe it won't be too much of a decline - or maybe even
better.
Those are just my thoughts - take them for what they're worth.
Monty
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