Tag Archives: events

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.

Three best features of open source events

As part of Stormy’s ongoing blog challenge, here’s my take on “Three best features of open source events.”

1. The hackathon

While there is considerable evidence that the term “hackathon” should be avoided (No, I can’t find the article right now. I’ll keep looking), the collaborative space at an event is, in my opinion, the most important part of an open source event.

Open source events are educational, of course. You can attend a talk and learn things. But most of the information that you need to learn is available, free, online. So to me the most important part of an event is the opportunity to meet and collaborate with the other people on the project.

Defining a specific space for this is critical to get people to sit down and play along. Signs identifying project teams or topics is even more welcoming. Having a white board where people can identify specifically what they are working on gives a way for introverts to be overtly welcoming of other people with similar interests.

Publicizing the collaborative space well in advance of  the event gives the opportunity for people to discuss what they might work on, and gives some people the added incentive to show up at all.

2. The after-party

While it’s indeed a cliche (because it’s true!) that open source events have too much alcohol, having an after-event, with or without food and/or drinks, is a critical part of the event. It gives a specific time and place for your community to get to know one another in a less formal atmosphere, and talk about something other than code. These kinds of community bonds will simply never happen on the mailing list, which is by design focused on the project, the code, the design, and so on, rather than on the personalities.

Open source communities fail because of personality issues at least as often as they do because of code issues. Providing a specific time and space to address these issues saves communities. As we say at Apache, Community > Code.

3. The keynotes

Picking good keynotes is really hard, because keynotes should be inspiring. As such, they don’t always have to be directly related to the topic of the event, but should be, in some way, of interest to the audience.

A keynote should be delivered by someone who is engaging and eloquent. And it should have some kind of call to action, or end on a note that inspires the audience to go do something.

I’ve been attending technical conferences for 20 years, and I remember only a handful of keynotes. I remember Douglas Adams because he was funny. I remember Hugh Howie because I got to sit on stage with him and grill him about the process of being an author and engaging your fans. I remember an OSCon keynote about maps, and one by a guy from WETA about the making of the Lord of the Rings movies. I remember Gema Parreño talking about using data to save the earth from collision with space objects. And most recently, Sandra Matz talking about what your social media profile says about you.

But there have also been a lot of clunkers, and a lot of product pitches, and a lot of Hey Look At Me talks. I can do without those.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for great keynotes, please let me know. 🙂

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.