[RFC] CUDCon - Cloud conference to parallel FUDCon

[Karsten Wade]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 04:47:07PM -0400, David Nalley wrote:
> 
> Hi Quaid,
> 
> So I have been thinking about this from both a conference perspective
> and a Fedora perspective, and I think my reaction depends on what you
> want to achieve.

I'm glad you've had a chance to ruminate on it. :)

> If you want to achieve a 'cloud' section of FUDcon I think this will
> work well. If you are thinking of eventually spinning off CUDcon into
> it's own independent conference I think it will work contrary to your
> long term goals. Fedora, while awesome, and dear to my heart, is
> likely to be pretty polarizing 'parent' to the conference. Both FUDcon
> and JUDcon are pretty project-specific, and while there is always
> tangential material, it's always been focused. So for instance there
> are certain cloud projects that have targeted certain distributions
> that aren't Fedora for one reason or another - how welcome are they
> going to feel? There's also going to be the perception that this is
> RHT's conference, and since essentially RHT is a competitor in the
> cloud space with other cloud projects I fear many of them will feel
> it's pointless to show up, or that they aren't welcome. (After all,
> would we send someone to UDS to talk about how awesome Fedora 16 with
> Gnome 3 is?)

I guess I just don't know the real facts on how people feel and
think, so I don't really know where to position these ideas:

1. Neutral-ground open source cloud conference that doesn't take
   itself too seriously.

2. Provides value of getting things done rather than all the vendors
   getting together to talk at each other for three days. Unconference
   and hackathon, which benefits from the sort of upstream experience
   available at a typical FUDCon.

3. Grows itself not to the detriment of other conferences because it
   solves a problem otherwise unsolved, and so brings value to
   whatever other events it might be paired with.

I mean, if there is a neutral-ground open source cloud conference I
should be focusing on, maybe that's a better idea for this energy?

> We've also all experienced the problems that come with just tacking on
> events to conferences. If they are done before or after the conference
> they seem to work well. If they run parallel one of two things happen:
> 1. The draw to the add-on is so great it hurts the conference itself,
> or 2. The main conference is so captivating that no one shows up for
> the add-on.

Are those the only optional results? Or the most likely?

I'll claim being inexperienced here. I have seen it both work and not
work, depending.

> I like the idea of a CUDcon - but if it were me (and it clearly isn't,
> I am doing no work on this.) I think I'd shoot for a standalone
> conference, once a year, and before it's even announced I'd get some
> significant buy in from the folks at places like Gluster, Euca,
> OpenStack, Ceph(Dreamhost), CloudFoundry, etc, so that they will show
> up and participate.) To my knowledge there's no cloud-focused open
> source conference, and it's a niche that done right should draw lots
> of folks.

OK, thanks, that's definitely one of the potential solutions.

- Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:   Red Hat Community Architecture & Leadership
uri:             http://communityleadershipteam.org
                        http://TheOpenSourceWay.org
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/cloud/attachments/20110822/2e4b6285/attachment.sig>