Thoughts on the future of FUDCon/DoCon

[Eric "Sparks" Christensen]

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On 07/26/2012 12:43 PM, Jon Stanley wrote:
> * I think that the openness of the current format is something that
> we want to preserve. I don't want to turn it into a "invite-only"
> event (ala UDS). If people want to show up, we should foster new 
> contributors at this event. But we should make it *extremely
> clear* that is the purpose.

Definitely agree here.  We should want people to come join us and work
with us.  New faces are always great and at the same time we need the
old faces as well to help mentor the new faces.

> * There may be people that (for whatever reason) don't want to or 
> can't travel out-of-region. Just something to think about. Again, 
> reading the comments on the blog post got me thinking that
> proximity to the majority of the people that are actually doing
> things would be important - it's a quite different thing for me to
> head up to, say Boston from NYC, than it is for me to go to London
> for something.

This is one of the big turn-offs to this idea, to me.  Travel isn't easy
or fun (for some (most?) of us).  Sitting on an airplane for hours is
not even in my top 1000 list of things to do.  I suspect that many
people won't make the journey, if not because of comfort then because of
time constraints, etc.  We'll end up with an event that is attended by
mainly the locals and we would have not achieved the goal of a global
event.

> Lastly, I think that we do want to preserve events for users. I'm
> not sure how to do this off the top of my head, though. Just
> throwing an idea out on the table would be to have something sort
> of like a FAD in conjunction with major OSS conferences (thinking
> things like SCaLE and OLF in NA, LinuxTag in EMEA, etc) that
> wouldn't need a ton of contributors present, so it'd be cheap to
> do. I think that showing off what (and who!) Fedora is makes a lot
> of sense.

So maybe we're just not defining things correctly.  IMO, the mission of
the FUDCon is to not only bring contributors together but also users.
And hopefully we'll turn users into contributors along the way.  We're
not going to be able to truck users in from around the globe.  Clearly
we need to keep a user event local to a region.

And we already have DoCons now only we call them FADs.  Up until now,
I believe the understanding of a FAD was that it is a small event; why
should it be?  Why can't we set aside funds to bring teams/projects
together to work once a year?  I think the effect would be the same as
what's being proposed while at the same time we can attempt to have a
greater user focus at the FUDCons as I'm assuming they were meant to be.

Just a thought...

- -Eric
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