Category: Conferences

Community Over Code – The ASF Conference!

Community Over Code may be a blog here by Shane – but it’s also the new branding for the ASF’s own conference series! Formerly known as ApacheCon, Community Over Code events are still held every year around the world, and gather community members from across ASF projects to share their stories about communities, technology, and more.

Community Over Code EU was most recently in Bratislava, Slovakia, a truly beautiful city. I was very happy to attend after a few years of not traveling to get back in touch with all my European ASF friends. The weather was beautiful, we held one of our sessions in a grand hotel ballroom suitable for signing international treaties, and to food was wonderful for the whole week we were there. Plus, we drew in a number of other FOSS luminaries for some excellent sessions on the CRA, PLD, and other legislation – truly eye opening.

Photograph of street art in Bratislava. There is a large wooden panel on the side of a tile building; painted on the panel is a whimsical picture of a cat. Teh cat is mostly yellow, and is wearing a red and green striped shirt, and has big green eyes looking at you.

Community Over Code Asia is coming up right now in July, in Hangzhou, China. This is always a great event, truly groundbreaking in supporting local open source communities and making global connections between many ASF projects and contributors.

And of course Community Over Code NA will be back this October, coming again to Denver. I’m really looking forward to our biggest gathering of ASF people every year, and am happy to be speaking on community and sustainability topics.

Monktoberfest 2019 theme

Monktoberfest – the small but influential and highly curated single-track conference run by RedMonk and Steve O’Grady – always has a theme to the talks. I’ve been trying to quantify what I think the theme is all day, although there’s so much good content here it’s hard to quantify it clearly.

My default description of Monktoberfest talks is that it’s about how technology shapes society – and bring data. In the past, many of the speakers had done real research into their subjects and could provide rich and detailed source references behind the compelling and innovative narrative they spun. I have to say this year has been very light on the data side (so far; there are more talks tomorrow), but are the equal of any in the storytelling and concepts.

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Dear Conference Organizers: Improving The Speaker Experience

Juggling several speaking engagements coming up, I’m reminded of how hard the job of conference organizers is.  Having helped to run ApacheCon as part of a volunteer team for years, I know how difficult it is to select talks, wrangle speaker acceptances (and rejections), and ensure your final conference schedule is appealing.  Updating the clunky CFP system and keeping the finicky schedule website updated are two problems that software hasn’t solved yet.

Equally important is how the conference acceptance & organization process works from the speaker’s side.  Remember?  Those people who make all the content your conference relies on?  All those people who you love and appreciate – not that you pay them anything – and who you’ll do anything to fix last-minute problems for?  While we can’t prevent all the last minute problems, there are a few simple steps to improve the speaker communication process to help prevent problems.

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ApacheCon Big Data/Core News Wrapup

Our annual Apache:Big Data and ApacheCon:Core events were held recently at the lovely Corinthia Hotel Budapest, and the content and attendees were amazing.  The weather was great too, and sightseeing and shopping in Budapest were lovely.  Attendance was still good even in the face of time-competing software conferences and the local refugee crisis happening in the region.

While they were booked as separate events, many people stayed for the whole week.  Going forward, we will likely have a single event, but be even clearer with the strength of content in specific track days.  The broad array of very deep and well-received technical content in the big data space was truly impressive; Apache has over a dozen big data related projects and probably 20 more incoming Incubator podlings, so we certainly have the space covered!

Continue reading ApacheCon Big Data/Core News Wrapup

ApacheCon Europe 2014 Blog Roundup

As our intrepid conference master and ASF’s EVP Rich Bowen Notes in the Margin,
we recently held a spectacular 24th ApacheCon at the beautiful
Corinthia Hotel in Budapest, Hungary – followed by the CloudStackCollab
conference focused on the fast-growing Apache CloudStack project.

Rich, LinuxFoundation production staff, and an array of Apache volunteers put
together a great set of talks with some very focused
tracks on specific days – both for technology as well as for community
and business interests around Apache projects. As Rich notes: if your are an
Apache committer and want to speak, or see your project represented at
the next ApacheCon US April 13-17th, 2015, in Austin, Texas then sign up to help organize!

Here’s a roundup of Apache folk’s blogs about the event:

Unfortunately we don’t have video for talks this year. That means that folks
who couldn’t attend are missing out on an inspiring keynote from this year’s
conference: David Nalley talking about the Value Of The ASF. This is one
of those talks where the slides don’t make sense without hearing about it.
David came up with various figures representing the “value” of the code that
all Apache projects provide – and they’re massive numbers. More importantly,
the larger value of the ASF is the proven Apache Way of organizing
large-scale, long-lived collaborative activities between heterogeneous
groups of individuals – and making it work in a way that allows companies to
invest their resources (employee time and sponsorship) without impinging on
the independent governance of Apache projects.

Matching our inspiring talks was the friendliness of the
staff at the beautiful Corinthia Hotel Budapest, along with the beauty, history,
and warmth of the city of Budapest and the people of Hungary. A week alone
is not enough to see the sights of the city, and it’s no where near long
enough to enjoy all the wonderful food and drink there! Here’s hoping that we’ll
be able to come back next year!

ApacheCon Denver is NEXT WEEK!

Wow, that was fast! I’ll be seeing a number of you next week in Denver – both for ApacheCon and the immediately following CloudStack Collaboration conference. I’ve finally filled in my tentative schedule, and this will be a huge conference for fans of many, many different Apache project fans.

Did you know ApacheCon has Lucene & Friends talks every day? Of course there are five separate categories of Hadoop talks with multiple tracks. And having many more rooms than past ApacheCons – 9 simultaneous tracks – projects like Tomcat (and the Friday Tomcat Summit!), Cordova, CXF, OpenOffice, and Traffic Server each have their own dedicated tracks. And, the whole host of different cloud projects at Apache have their own 2+ days – just at ApacheCon. Of course Apache CloudStack has it’s own whole 2 day conference immediately after ApacheCon wraps up!

In a first, I’ll be speaking three times this week in my role as Vice President, Brand Management: one talk about what Apache projects need to do to help protect their brands, and another talk (reprised at CloudStack) about how your for-profit company can respect Apache brands. While I hope to have time for Q&A in these sessions, I’d also love to hear from everyone about their questions about Apache brands anytime during the conference.

If you’re a committer or a PMC member, you can do your homework and read up on PMC Branding Responsibilities beforehand.

For long-time ApacheCon attendees (I’m over a dozen, myself), there will be a few changes for the better. The transition to our new conference management company, the Linux Foundation, has gone great so far, and they’ve helped us plan out the largest and most ambitious ApacheCon to date. Hope to see you there!

How To Pack For ApacheCon NA 2011

Don’t forget your passport!

  • Airport: YVR
  • Getting to the hotel: VancouverTips
  • Local Google Map of Hotel
  • The Westin Bayshore is the conference location
  • The conference sessions/expo will all have an ApacheCon wifi network available all day. Wifi is available in hotel rooms for an extra charge.

Conference schedule and discussions:

Social Networks:

Official @ApacheCon twitter feed.

+1 Friend ApacheCon NA 2011!

ApacheCon is coming up soon – 7-11 November this year in lovely Vancouver, BC. Be sure to make your travel plans soon, especially for any US travelers who need to remember that we’re in Canada this year!

Is ApacheCon on your friends list? Let others know you’re attending by friending or signing up on your favorite social network:

Even better, you can now +1 ApacheCon postings on Google Plus. Talk about the “+1” phrase coming full circle back to the group that popularized it years ago!

Apache winter news roundup: new and famous projects

It’s continued to be a busy winter at the ASF, with a number of new projects being announced – as well as this year’s ApacheCon!

  • Submit your ideas now for the CFP of ApacheCon NA 2011 – coming to Vancouver this 7-11 November. CFP submissions are open through April.
  • Welcome Apache Extras! Apache Extras is the the place for all your Apache-related software that’s not an Apache project. That means that projects that might not use the Apache license or might not meet the community criteria for formal Apache projects, but are still related to Apache technology. Apache Extras gives you all the infrastructure support of Google Code, and shows your project’s interest in Apache technologies.
  • Welcome to our new Executive Assistant! The ASF has hired an EA to assist with a broad array of administrative tasks, who is already helping out with our conferences and other corporate operations.
  • We’ve got new top level projects! Over the past few months, the Incubator has graduated the following projects:
  • Apache Thrift is a scalable cross-language framework for code generation between a wide variety of popular programming languages.
  • Apache ZooKeeper, an Apache Hadoop spinoff, provides a centralized service for providing distributed synchronization of configuration information and other services.
  • Apache OODT (press release) is middleware for managing data used in critical scientific applications – and features original code and contributors from NASA and the JPL. Yes, real rocket scientists work on OODT!
  • Apache ESME stands for Enterprise Social Messaging Environment, and allos for secure and scalable microsharing and micromessaging applications.
  • Apache Aries implements the EEG’s enterprise OSGi specification for multi-bundle applications.
  • Apache River implements JINI services and allows construction of secure and distributed systems.
  • Apache Chemistry (press release) is an implementation of the OASIS CMIS standard, allowing access to a wide variety of different vendor’s CMIS repositories.
  • We also say goodbye to Apache Excalibur, which has been boxed up and stored in the Apache Attic for posterity – or until someone new comes along to draw the sword back out of the box.

    • There were several other interesting happenings in Apache land recently as well.

    • Apache UIMA and Hadoop technologies helped IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeat humanity in the TV game show Jeopardy! As one of the human contestants wrote: “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”
    • The Apache Subversion project issued an open letter to a corporation who is an active contributor and user of Subversion. While this is an unfortunate situation of a third party effectively usurping some of the good will generated by the Subversion project itself, the issue is being addressed, and it looks like we’ll have a productive resolution. This underscores the importance of appropriate governance and trademark protection for open source projects.
    • Separately, those interested in using Apache projects may be interested in a number of much more detailed trademark policies that the ASF is working on, in an effort to make it simpler for third parties to associate with our projects, while ensuring that our project communities get full and proper credit for their work.

    ApacheCon NA 2010 Wrapup

    Along with a few news tidbits today, here’s my long-awaited ApacheCon NA 2010 blog wrapup, featuring highlights from attendees.

    And of course there’s the official roundup from the show floor at ApacheCon. If I missed your great blog post about this year’s ApacheCon, let me know!

    In other news, BarCampApache Sydney is this weekend, on 11-Dec with it’s own press release and discussion group.

    And today is the big day! The Java EC’s vote on the Java 7/8 JSRs concludes today, which will determine the openness – or lack thereof – of the future of Java. I’m sure that Stephen Colbourne will be covering it.