Tag Archives: conferences

Measuring conferences

In a normal year, I go to a lot of conferences. 10-14, typically. These events are, presumably, picked because they are in some way useful to my company, or my project.

That’s really hard to measure.

We kind of just know which events are good ones – a gut feeling – but we kind of stink at actual metrics.

One of my goals this year was to be more rigorous about measuring what benefits I got from a conference, so that my budget is spent as effectively as possible, in ways that actually produce long-term benefit. This then informs the events that we’ll do the following year.

Caveat: I am a community manager. As such I care about community metrics. Not sales. Not business cards. Not dollars or contracts. That makes these things that much trickier to track.

Here’s some of the things that I try to measure when I do a conference.

Meaningful Conversations. Most of the people that come to a conference booth are there to get the free stuff. But a precious small number are there to learn, to connect, to solve, to contribute. In past years I have kept a bit of an impression as to how many that was, as a fuzzy metric of whether a particular event was the right audience. This year, it was my goal to actually count, and keep that data from year to year.

New Community Members. This is hard, and, frankly, I don’t know how to track this. But it’s really the most important thing that I would like to track. I know, anecdotally, that lots of people, over the years, have joined, and stayed with, Apache projects because of an experience at ApacheCon. But that’s not the only factor, and it’s certainly hard to track because it requires years of events, and years of conversations, and people willing to tell those stories. I would like a better way to track this, and would love to hear your ideas.

Content. This one is easy to track. A lot of the events I run are all about content creation. When I run a CentOS Dojo, maybe 100 people attend, but then 1000 people see the videos that I record at the event, And maybe 1000 more read the blog posts that come out of those presentations. This is trickier when I am not running the event, and so don’t have control over that. At those events, I try to be very intentional about collecting stories. Stories can be interviews (video, audio, written notes), or they can be a promise of a later story, either delivered in writing, or via a video call that we schedule after the event. Here, obviously, followup is critical, and so it was my goal to be much more intentional about collecting contact info, and detailed notes about why I had that contact info. I wrote a blog post about that after FOSDEM.

As we try to be more intentional about what events we attend, sponsor, and speak at, it would be great to hear from some of you about what you measure, and how, to figure out if a conference (or other event) is a worthwhile investment of your team’s time and money.

Upcoming events (June and beyond)

I’m about to head out for a few events again, and I’m in the process of planning several other events.

First, I’ll be in Berlin for FOSS Backstage , Berlin Buzzwords , and the Apache EU RoadShow. This is a trifecta of open source events happening at the Kulturbrauerei in Berlin. I’ll be speaking at Backstage about mentoring in open source, which, you might know, is something I’m passionate about. I’ll also be doing interviews for Feathercast, so if you’re going to be there, find me and do an interview.

I’ll be home for a week, and then I’ll be attending the ISC-HPC Supercomputing event in Frankfurt. This is the second time I’ll attend this event, which was my introduction to Supercomputing last year. I’ve learned so much since then, but I’m still an HPC newbie. While there, I hope to spend most of my time speaking with the EDUs and research orgs that are present, and doing interviews with the student supercomputing teams that are participating in the Student Cluster Competition.

Beyond that, I’m planning several events, where I’ll be representing CentOS.

In August, I’ll be attending DevConf.us in Boston, and on the day before DevConf, we’ll be running a CentOS Dojo at Boston University. The call for papers for that event is now open, so if you’re doing anything interesting around CentOS, please submit a paper and come hang out with us.

Later in August, I will (maybe? probably?) be going to Vancouver for Open Source Summit North America (formerly Linuxcon) to represent CentOS.

In September, I’ll be at ApacheCon North America in Montreal. The schedule for this event is published, and registration is open. You should really come. ApacheCon is something I’ve been involved with for 20 years now, and I’d love to share it with you.

October is going to be very full.

CentOS is proudly sponsoring Ohio LinuxFest, which apparently I last attended in 2011! (That can’t be right, but that’s the last one I have photographic evidence for.) We (CentOS) will be sharing our booth/table space with Fedora, and possibly with some of the project that use the CentOS CI infrastructure for their development process. More details as we get closer to the event. That’s October 12th – 13th in Columbus.

Then, on October 19th, we’ll be at CERN, in Meyrin, Switzerland, for the second annual Cern CentOS Dojo. Details, and the call for papers, for that event, are on the event website at http://cern.ch/centos.

Immediately after that, I’ll be going (maybe? probably?) to Edinburgh for Open Source Summit Europe. This event was in Edinburgh a few years ago, and it was a great location.

Finally, in November, I plan to attend SuperComputing 18 in Dallas, which is the North American version of the HPC event in Frankfurt, although it tends to be MUCH bigger. Last year, at the event in Denver, I walked just over 4 miles one day on the show floor, visiting the various organizations presenting there.

So, that’s it for me, for the rest of the year, as far as I know. I would love to see you if you’ll be at, or near, any of these venues.

The Things They Carried


Every time I go to a conference, I pack pretty much the same things. Each item has its place in my bag.

Here they all are. Click on the picture for the full size. Image annotations were made in Inkscape, with assistance by Ruth.

Missing from this photo is my laptop, which of course I also always take. Except for that one time I forgot it, and Maria had to rush it to the airport for me. Oops. The laptop is a Lenovo T450s ThinkPad running Fedora 26. It has roughly 78,000 stickers on it.

The numbered items in the picture are as follows:

 

  1. This is a lovely leather satchel which Maria ordered for me, from China. People ask about it all the time. No, I don’t know what site it came from. It is awesome. It has all the pockets. So many pockets.
  2. This is a “travel charm” that Daniel got for me in a shinto shrine downtown Tokyo. The next time I was in Tokyo I got one for each of the coworkers I travel with the most. No, I’m not superstitious. It’s just a nice reminder of going to Tokyo, and a lovely gift from a friend.
  3. Tablet. This one is a Samsung Galaxy Tab A. It has numerous downloaded movies from Netflix on it, as well as a dozen books. It keeps me entertained on the plane.
  4. Phone. Google Nexus 6P
  5. Plastic bag of micro SD cards, which I use in the various audio and video recording devices I carry with me.
  6. Power supply for my laptop.
  7. This little guy is named Zipper Pull Man, and was made for me by my daughter, Rhiannon, probably 15 years ago. Possibly longer. It is made of plastic beads strung on plastic cords, and has traveled with me to 5 continents. In October it’ll go to the 6th. It has been repaired and restrung many many times.
  8. Leather cable wrap. Maria made this out of scrap leather. It holds various USB cables and chargers.
  9. Another leather cable wrap. This one usually carries AV stuff, like video adapters and audio cables. It’s got USB cables in it right now. You can never have too many cables.
  10. Wallet
  11. 22,000mAh phone charger battery. Can charge my phone about 5 times, or my tablet twice, from dead.
  12. Collapsible tripod for my video camera
  13. Zoom H2n microphone/recorder.
  14. Extension audio cable for that microphone
  15. Canon Vixia HF R72 video camera.
  16. Universal international power plug adapter.
  17. Phone charger battery. Can usually get one charge out of this one.
  18. Keys
  19. Micro SD card reader. Plugs into a USB port.
  20. Headache pills
  21. Mini power strip. 3 outlets.
  22. Passport
  23. Yet another cable wrap. I might slim it down to just two. I might have too many USB cables.
  24. Reading glasses. Yes, I’m that old.
  25. Sunglasses.
  26. Spare batteries for #15
  27. Gorillapod flexible tripod for #13
  28. Hearing aid batteries.
  29. Flashlight and bottle opener
  30. Another USB SD card reader. Handles micro SD cards and regular SD cards.
  31. Power supply for #15
  32. Remote slide clicker thingy
  33. Dart sharpener
  34. Handle for man-on-the-street interviews using #13
  35. Remote bluetooth microphone for my hearing aid
  36. Monocular. That’s like binoculars, but just one.
  37. Various business cards.
  38. Fancy USB-C charger for #4
  39. These items usually end up in my suitcase rather than my carry-on, since they are pointy. The black case holds my darts. The weird monkey thing is a PocketMonkey tool. And the knife is my current favorite pocket knife.
  40. Moleskine cahier notebook and fountain pens. The pens are in a Quiver pen holder.

By the way, “The Things They Carried” is an excellent book by Tim O’Brien. You should read it.

Addendum: There’s one tiny un-numbered box right in the middle. That is a 20 cent Euro coin that was in the bottom of my bag.

 

Event report: Red Hat Summit, OpenStack Summit

Event report: Red Hat Summit, OpenStack Summit

May 1-5, 2017 and May 8-11, 2017

During the first two weeks of May, I attended Red Hat Summit, followed by OpenStack Summit. Since both events were in Boston (although not at the same venue), many aspects of them have run together.

Mini-cluster

On the first day of Red Hat Summit, I received the mini-cluster, which had been built in Brno for the April Brno open house. There were one or two steps missing from the setup instructions, so with a great deal of help from Hugh Brock, it too most of the first day to get the cluster running. We’ll be publishing more details about the mini-cluster on the RDO blog in the next week or two. However, most of the problems were 1) it was physically connected incorrectly (ie, my fault) and 2) there were some routing table changes that were apparently not saved after initial setup.

Once the cluster was up, we connected to the ManageIQ cluster on the other side of our booth, and they were able to manage our OpenStack deployment. Thus, we were able to demonstrate the two projects working together.

In future events, we’d like to bring more projects into this arrangement – say, use Ceph for storage, or have ManageIQ managing OpenStack and oVirt, for example.

After we got the cluster working, in subsequent days, we just had to power it on, follow the startup instructions, and be patient. Again, more details of this will be in the RDO blog post in the coming  weeks.

Upcoming CentOS Dojos

I had conversations with two groups about planning upcoming CentOS Dojos.

The first of these will be at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL), and is
now tentatively scheduled for the first Tuesday in September.  (If you saw my internal event report, I mentioned July/August. This has since changed.) They’re interested in doing a gathering that would be about both CentOS and OpenStack, and draw together some of the local developer community. This will be held in conjunction with the local LOPSA group.

The second Dojo that we’re planning will be at CERN, where we have a great relationship with the cloud computing group, who run what we believe to be the largest RDO installation in the world. We have a tentative date of October 20th, immediately before Open Source Summit in Prague to make it easier to combine two trips for those traveling internationally. This event, too, would cover CentOS topics as well as OpenStack/RDO topics.

If you’re interested in participating in either one of these events, you need to be on the centos-promo mailing list. Send mail to centos-promo-subscribe@centos.org to subscribe, or visit https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-promo for the
clicky-clicky version.

General Impressions

The Community Central area at Red Hat Summit was awesome. Sharing center stage with the product booths was a big win for our upstream first message, and we had a ton of great conversations with people who grasped the “X is the upstream for Red Hat X” concept, seemingly, for the first time. The “The Roots Are In The Community” posters resonated with a lot of people, so huge thanks to Tigert for pulling those together at the last minute.

The collaboration between RDO and ManageIQ was very rewarding, and helped promote the CloudForms message even more, because people could see it in action, and see how the communities work together for the greater good of humanity. I look forward to expanding this collaboration to all of the projects in the Community Central area by next year.

The space for Red Hat Summit was huge, making the crowd seem a lot smaller than it actually was. The opposite was true for  OpenStack Summit, where it was always crowded and seemed very busy, even though the crowd was smaller than last year.

 

Where next?

In three weeks I’ll be heading to the High Performance Computing event in Frankfurt. My mission there is to talk with people that are using CentOS and RDO in HPC, and collect user stories.

OpenStack PTG, trip report

last week, I attended the OpenStack PTG (Project Teams Gathering) in Atlanta.

Even more in depth: PTG info at https://www.openstack.org/blog/2016/05/faq-evolving-the-openstack-design-summit/

TL;DR:

1) This is a hugely productive event, with project teams getting an enormous amount of work done without the distractions that are usually present at a conference.

2) I remain very concerned about how this event will effect the
character of OpenStack Summit – removing the bulk of the engineers from that event, and making it more product/marketing/sales focused. Time will tell

At the gathering, I did 23 interviews with Red Hat engineers about what they did in the Ocata release. You can see some of those interview on the RDO YouTube Channel. I’m not done editing them all yet, but they will appear over the coming weeks as part of various blog posts, as well as all of them appearing in that YouTube playlist.

I am constantly blown away by the passion, expertise, and
professionalism of the folks I get to work with. Wow.

Anyways, more about the PTG.

I was (and, really, still am) very skeptical about this new format.
Splitting OpenStack Summit into four events rather than two has already had significant impact on travel budgets, not just at Red Hat, but also at other companies involved in OpenStack. A lot of companies, for example, didn’t send anyone to FOSDEM, and we had a hard time staffing the OpenStack table there. Usually people work one shift at the table, but this year several of us worked 4 and 5 shifts to cover all the slots.

I am concerned that splitting the engineers off into their own event
will significantly change the character of OpenStack Summit from being a community-centric, tech-centric event, to more of a sales and marketing event, light on technical depth.

But this event, for what was intended, has already been amazing.
Everyone is commenting on how much is getting done, how much less distracted the team meetings are, how much better the teams are gelling than they have at any previous event. This is a working event, and people are here to get work done. They are meeting all day, every day, working on plans and blueprints, and fighting out agreements on things that would take weeks in email, and everyone seems VERY pleased with outcomes.

So, perhaps the trade off will be worth it. Time will tell. Regardless, Erin Disney and her team put on an amazing event that fulfilled, and exceeded, its goals.

On Wednesday  night, everyone that has ever contributed a patch to RDO was invited for drinks and hors d’oeuvres at the SideBar, and while there the RDO Ocata release announcement was sent out.

We had about 50 people in attendance, who ate and drank up all of my budget in about 2 hours.

Here’s some pictures.

 

LinuxCon NA 2014

Last week I attended LinuxCon North America in Chicago.

As always when I go to a conference, there’s always about 5 things going on at any moment, and one has to decide where to be and what to do, and then wish you’d done the other thing.

I spent most of the time working the Red Hat booth, talking to people about RDO, OpenShift, Atomic, and, of course, 3D printing.

I also spent a little time over at the OpenStack booth, although it was mostly staffed pretty well without me. The cool thing about the OpenStack booth was the representation from many different companies, all working together to make OpenStack successful, and the ability to be cordial – even friendly – in the process.

While I didn’t attend very many talks, there were a few that I made it to, and some of these were really great.

Rikki Endsley’s talk You Know, for Kids! 7 Ideas for Improving Tech Education in Schools was largely a story about an unfortunate experience in a high school programming class, and the lessons learned from it. I’m very interested in stories like this, primarily because I want to teach my daughters, but also, my son, how to deal with gender discrimination in their various interests, although it seems particularly troublesome in geekly pursuits.

Guy Martin’s talk Developing Open Source Leadership was brilliant. He talked about how to participate in Open Source projects, and encourage your employees to do so, for the specific goal of establishing your company as a leader in a particular field. While this sounds like it may be about subverting the character of Open Source for your own financial benefit, it didn’t go that direction at all. Instead, he talked about being a good community citizen, and truly establishing leadership by participating, not merely by gaming the system. This was a great talk, and well worth attending if you happen to see him giving it again.

The 3D printing keynotes on Friday were very high in geek factor, and, as we had a 3D printer at the Red Hat booth,
I learned more about 3D printing last week than anything else.

A large part of the value of the conference (as with most tech conferences these days) was the evening and hallway conversations, evening events, dinner with various people, and conversations with people stopping by the booth. The technical content is always useful. The personal connections and stories are absolutely the most valuable thing. Running into old friends and making new ones is also always a highlight of these events.

Wednesday evening, I participated in an event where we talked with the folks from Chicago CTO Forum about The Apache Software Foundation. That was a lot of fun, and I learned at least as much as I taught.

Thursday was superhero day, with various people dressing up as their favorite heros. Alas, I didn’t take a costume, but several of my coworkers did.

A final highlight of the conference (and of which I have no photos) was the running tour of the city. Friday morning, CittyRunningTours took me and 20 or so other runners on a historical and architectural tour of downtown Chicago. we ran about 4 miles, stopping every half mile or so for a history lesson. It was fascinating, as well as being a good run.

LinuxCon Japan day 0

My flight out of Lexington was delayed an hour and a half, resulting in a very tight connection in Chicago. I ran from gate to gate, and arrived as they were sounding the gate closing alarm. And a gate agent said that she thought I shouldn’t go, because my passport expires in September, and they’re not going to let me through immigration. (Turned out to not be a problem at all.)

But I made it on board – last one through the gate door – and had a pleasant flight to Narita. I arrived at Narita at about 5pm, and went to buy train tickets.

First challenge was getting cash. My debit card doesn’t have a chip in it, which is how cards work everywhere in the world other than the US, so the ATM said it wasn’t a valid card. Fortunately, the other ATM accepted it, and I was able to buy train tickets.

I took the train to Nipponi, and then changed trains there to go to Mejiro, without incident. People were very helpful in telling me how to get where I needed to go, and my worry was for nothing. The train was cheap ($12 and $1.50 for the two trips) and the taxi from the train station to the hotel was cheap ($15) and fast, too. I expected the trains to be packed, but they were spacious and incredibly quiet. Apparently it’s rude to speak on the train – or at least to speak loudly.

The airport was really quiet, too. The noise level in public spaces is really surprising – soooo quiet.

I arrived at the hotel around 7:30pm, and it is beautiful. It’s easily the most beautiful conference venue I’ve ever been at, and probably the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed at. Check out the photos at http://www.hotel-chinzanso-tokyo.com/

My photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rbowen/sets/72157644738464202/
Conference website: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-japan/
Hotel website: http://www.hotel-chinzanso-tokyo.com/

Day One at LinuxCon

Although much of yesterday at LinuxCon was spent in a jet-lagged fog, it was a great first day. I arrived at the Edinburgh airport at 8 in the morning (I know, I should have come a day or two early!) and took the bus to downtown, then walked up to the conference venue. It’s a lovely conference center located a short walk from numerous lovely pubs, bakeries, and shops.

I spent most of the day at the OpenStack booth, talking with people about what OpenStack is, as well as with people who have been using it for a long time and had deeper questions, or wanted to share what they’re doing with it.

In the evening, I met up with several colleagues – one of whom I had talked with online but never met – for dinner and discussion. I’m frequently impressed by my coworkers and their passion to solve problems, rather than simply jockeying for position and prowess. These guys really want to identify and squash bugs, both technical and relational. I love it.

After a very long day (I was up for nearly 40 hours, I think – time zones confuse me) I finally crashed around 9pm and got 11 hours of sleep. I feel much more human today and am really looking forward to the day. I have a few interviews I have tentatively scheduled for today and tomorrow to record for the RDO blog. Hopefully I can track these folks down.

Write A Better Talk

I just got done giving my Write A Better FM talk at Tek11, and I’m really pleased with how it was received. On the one hand, I feel like I was, at least a little, preaching to the choir, but I think I also got through to some people who had some of the same questions that I’ve thought about over the last 15 years.

I feel like my thoughts on the topic are still a little scattered, but putting together this talk solidified them quite a bit for me, and I think I might go back to working on the book just as soon as I finish the Apache book project I’m working.

If you’re interested in the topic of open source documentation, technical documentation in general, technical customer support, or any of those related topics, I’d very much like to hear from you, particularly if you 1) have a significant amount of experience in technical support and 2) are interested in collaborating with the book.

I realized, several times, mid-sentence, that I was being very harsh to one particular person or project, and backed off, but I think for the most part I am very pleased with how the talk went. I only regret that I wasn’t able to find my Flip before I left home. I would really like to have recorded it.

Geek Arrogance and Chauvinism

I read with mounting horror Aaron’s post about the Ruby conference, and the various things that he linked to from it. Unfortunately, it’s an old and familiar story.

Unfortunately, it reminds me of attitudes in another community I used to be very involved in – Perl. Attitudes within Perl seem to have changed an awful lot in the last 10 years. I’m sure a lot of that had to do with the discovery that Allison Randall was smarter than any half-dozen of the rest of us put together. But, too, it had a lot to do with the examples of folks like Larry Wall and Casey West, who demonstrated by their actions that it was possible to be brilliant, but still be professional. This is a message that many boys (I hesitate to call them men) within the Ruby community haven’t grasped yet.

Having been involved in the planning of ApacheCon for the last seven years, I’m also horrified that the planning committee for a (seemingly) respectable conference would accept a talk that made no secret of the fact that it would use jokes about pornography to make its points.

I’ve written before about how pornography is treated as acceptable for public discourse. That was 6 years ago. At least in the technical circles *I* work in, this attitude has lessened, but not vanished, in that time. It is far less common for me to hear reference to porn in every day technical discussion than it was back then. I don’t assume that the people in question believe, as I do, that pornography itself is damaging. I think it has more to do with the realization that some discussions simply don’t belong in professional settings. When someone spends good money to travel and attend your conference, they deserve to be treated with professionalism and respect, not treated to a stream of pornographic images and sexual innuendoes.

And this isn’t just about alienating the women in your audience. Turns out that some heterosexual men actually believe that objectifying women isn’t a good thing. But even if you don’t accept that belief, you owe it to your audience to treat them with professional courtesy, and recognize that they are paying a LOT of money to attend a technical conference, not a peep show.

Shame on Matt for putting together this presentation. Double shame on GoGaRuCo for accepting this talk. Shame on the decent men in the audience (assuming there were any) who didn’t get up and walk out after the first slide. Shame on the chauvinistic boors who are defending Matt in the various forums where this is being discussed.

Turns out, in the real world, it actually matters if you’re a jerk. It’s time for the Ruby On Rails community to grow up and realize that being professional isn’t a weakness. But it would be grossly short-sighted to merely point the finger at them and not take a close look at the attitudes within our own communities – be they technical or otherwise – and seriously reconsider our common courtesy in the work place.