Last week I had the honor of chairing ApacheCon North America 2014 in Denver Colorado. I could hardly be any prouder of what we were able to do on such an incredibly short timeline. Most of the credit goes to Angela Brown and her amazing team at the Linux Foundation who handled the logistics of the event.

My report to the Apache Software Foundation board follows:

ApacheCon North America 2014 was held April 7-9 in Denver, Colorado, USA. Despite the very late start, we had higher attendance than last year, and almost everyone that I have spoken with has declared it an enormous success. Attendees, speakers and sponsors have all expressed approval of the job that Angela and the Linux Foundation did in the production of the event. Speaking personally, it was the most stress-free ApacheCon I have ever had.

Several projects had dedicated hackathon spaces, while the main hackathon room was unfortunately well off of the beaten path, and went unnoticed by many attendees. We plan to have the main hackathon space much more prominently located in a main traffic area, where it cannot be missed, in Budapest, as I feel that the hackathon should remain a central part of the event, for its community-building opportunities.

Speaking of Budapest, on the first day of the event, we announced ApacheCon Europe, which will be held November 17-21 2014 in Budapest. The website for that is up at http://apachecon.eu/ and the CFP is open, and will close June 25, 2014. We plan to announce the schedule on July 28, 2014, giving us nearly 4 months lead time before the conference. We have already received talk submissions, and a few conference registrations. I will try to provide statistics each month between now and the conference.

As with ApacheCon NA, there will be a CloudStack Collaboration Conference co-located with ApacheCon. We are also discussing the possibility of a co-located Apache OpenOffice user-focused event on the 20th and 21st, or possibly just one day.

We eagerly welcome proposals from other projects which wish to have similar co-located events, or other more developer- or PMC-focused events like the Traffic Server Summit, which was held in Denver.

Discussion has begun regarding a venue for ApacheCon North America 2015, with Austin and Las Vegas early favorites, but several other cities being considered.

I’ll be posting several more things abut it, because they deserve individual attention. Also, we’ll be posting video and audio from the event on the ApacheCon website in the very near future.