Tag: apachecon

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.

Continue reading Dear Conference Organizers: Improving The Speaker Experience

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!

ApacheCon presentation: Managing Apache Project Brands

At ApacheCon NA 2013 here in Portland, OR I will be talking to a packed house about how Apache projects manage branding and trademarks, to wild applause. OK, perhaps my crowd is not likely to give applause, but I’m certain it will be appreciated.

As a preview, here is the v2.0 slides of my presentation. While originally this was going to be similar to last summer’s OSCON presentation on Managing Open Source Brands, I’ve realized that the trademarks@ group at the ASF really has a very customized approach. So the slides have a very different feel, and help to show the real difference between how projects have maximum freedom – for their own technical / branding direction – but also have maximum support – because the ASF’s corporate organization stands behind their license, their trademarks, and our servers.

Managing Apache Project Brands slides (ODP

Please do let me know if you have comments on the presentation or my talk!

Slides are also posted on SlideShare.

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!

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.

Ask Me about FREE Apache Contributor buttons!

Back once again at ApacheCon, I’ll be giving out free Apache “Contributor” feather buttons. All you have to do to get your button is let me know that you’ve donated funds to the Apache Software Foundation. Any amount qualifies for your free button!

If you’re interested in sponsoring the ASF at a higher level, we’d love that too, and I might have a bunch of buttons for you!

You may also see a number of people at ApacheCon featuring giant “Ask Me!” buttons with the Apache feather on them. Please – follow directions, and ask us your questions! A number of knowledgeable members are wearing these buttons, and will be happy to answer your questions about what the larger ASF is all about, and why the organization behind all of our great projects is also important to support.

For those who can’t make it to ApacheCon, please feel free to contact me offline or on the mailing list for your button.

Reminder: Apache and the feather logo are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation, along with the names of our many projects – and should be used with respect both for the ASF as a whole and for the many committers in our project communities.

Signup for FREE events at ApacheCon next week!

ApacheCon NA offers a whole host of options next week in Atlanta, GA. There are a wide variety of trainings being taught by some of the key committers on Apache projects (look for the combination discount code!) on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday thru Friday we have 5 tracks of great sessions, covering everything from business case studies to detailed technical talks.

We also offer some free events – these are open to the public, even if you can’t attend ApacheCon sessions or trainings. We do ask that you sign up in advance if possible, so organizers know how large a crowd to expect.

  • BarCamp Apache is free and runs during the day on Monday and Tuesday. Sign up, show up, and lead your own session with other BarCamp attendees!
  • Apache Meetups are hosted Monday through Thursday nights, starting at 8pm. We have meetups covering Apache projects like Hadoop, Lucene & Solr, Cassandra, Tomcat, Subversion, Deltacloud, Felix & OSGi, and of course the HTTP server. Meetups are free to attend by all.

If you are interested in any of the paid sessions or free events at ApacheCon, then you can show your interest by signing up on these popular social networks:

Follow @ApacheCon to learn more!