Brian Exelbierd píše v Po 09. 01. 2017 v 12:07 +0100:
Warning: This email is long. I don't know how to avoid
that. I
debated making this a wiki, but I think we need more discussion that
just editing. There is no tl;dr. If you want a tl;dr perhaps you
should wait a while and participate near the end of the
conversation.
Warning: The opening text is the same for both Part I and Part II.
During 2016 I had the privilege of helping to plan and execute Flock
and attended both FUDCon LATAM (Puno) and FUDCon APAC (Phnom Penh).
Talking to people has led to me to believe that these events may not
be
meeting all of our goals. Specifically we are spending a lot of
time
and money on them and may not be getting our full value. I also
heard
a lot of comments about how the events are not equal from people who
thought they should be and not well distributed across the world
from
people who thought they should be. This led me to believe that
there
is a lot of confusion about why we do these events and what we want
out
of them.
In the spirit of it is easier to edit than to create, I am going to
propose some ideas. My goal is less to present this as a polished
proposal ready for a vote and more to allow us to have a discussion
around the finer points of the events strategy. It would be nice to
see
this discussion come to an end by the end of March so that it can
have
impact this year. The planning for Flock will begin soon (see my
another of my emails today) but the FUDCon processes are not heavily
started, as far as I can tell.
Additionally, while history is important, I think it is equally
important that we consider what we want to accomplish today and in
the
next few years, not just what we tried to accomplish in the past.
Therefore, I've written this without too much reference to what is
being
changed and instead as an idea of what we should be doing. I look
forward to folks bringing forward suggestions for continuing
activities
from the past or better incorporating lessons learned that I may have
missed.
I look forward to your feedback and input.
regards,
bex
# FUDCon
As mentioned above, I attended both FUDCons in 2016. These are the
only
two FUDCons that I have ever attended. I was told by attendees at
both
events that while every event is different, these two were fairly
typical in the areas I was concerned with.
FUDCons have been described to me as being for Fedora Users and
Developers (hence the name). What is never clear from the people
I've
talked to is what kind of users they think are targeted and whether
the
developers are "developers who use Fedora" or "people who develop
(contribute to) Fedora." Both events this year were held in
partnership
with Universities. Both had large attendances on the first day,
typically when students were incentivized to show up by their faculty
and poor attendance on the non-incentive days. It was unclear that
many
people took a lot away from the conference or that there would be
significant follow up activity. These comments are not to single out
the organizers for these FUDCons. They all worked very hard and
pulled
off very good events. I just didn't get a feeling that the events
had a
lot of impact and changed much in the short or long term.
I believe that for our investment of time, energy, and money in
FUDCons
to be successful, the goals of these events must be clarified.
## Structure
I believe we need to remove some of the restrictions we place
on these
events, chiefly on where and how often they can be held. Therefore,
I
believe we should simply state that FUDCons can be held anywhere in
the
world and any number of times that is appropriate. This means that
we
can have FUDCons in places like EMEA and NA (which helps to relieve
pressure on Flock).
Additionally, while FUDCons are inherently regional events, I believe
that the Fedora Council should nominally "own" them. This means that
the budget allocation should work like most FADs and be approved by
the
budget. I don't think this is a change from current practice.
While I hope that Ambassadors will take the lead in organizing and
running these events, I believe that any contributor should be able
to
make a proposal.
Finally, I believe these events do not need to be standalone. I
think
they can have greater impact when collocated with other conferences
or
run as "+1 days" to other events. While this shouldn't be a
requirement, I think it is a good practice to encourage.
Hi,
while there might some economies of scale and this option always looks
very appealing to people, I have almost never seen an event where it
brought a lot of benefit. The specialized co-located event never
attracted anyone from the larger event and people who came for the
specialized event were usually too busy to attend the larger event.
And if it's organized as "+1 day" event, it means people have to stay
longer to benefit from both, thus lodging costs go up.
I think the only exception was GNOME.Asia+FUDCon APAC 2014. Two smaller
events got together and created something big enough to attract
sponsors and visitors from far away. It also worked because
GNOME+Fedora is a combination that makes sense and there is an overlap
in contributors. I'm one of those who contribute to both.
Jiri
Another challenge for FUDCons that we should remove is to make it
easier
to organize them. Once a FUDCon is approved, we need to ensure that
we
have enough people and resources engaged to make the event a
success.
In the case of Flock we see several core organizers working with the
local organizer to make things happen. FUDCons should be able to
rely
on more support from the FCAIC and possibly others to help with
organizational details. We should also see FUDCons being proposed
with
robust organizing committees that are appropriate to the size of the
event.
## Goals
It is hard to write a single set of goals for a varied set of
events.
Instead, I think that we should consider these in a way that I hope
is
similar to how the Ambassadors consider events they attend.
Specifically, I believe that we should be asking the following
questions:
* Who specifically is this event targeting and why? How does this
group
align with the target audiences for Fedora?
* What are the specific desired outcomes of this event? How can we
see
evidence of achieving these goals? Evidence doesn't need to be
quantitative, it can be qualitative, but you need to have thought
through how you know you were a success.
* Why should we hold a FUDCon in this specific city?
* How will you ensure you attract the right audience and that they
are
engaged? What preparatory activities need to happen? How will those
happen? What follow up activities are needed? How will those happen?
* If this FUDCon is collocated, why is this conference or event the
right one to collocate with? If this FUDCon is not collocated, why
is
an independent event better?
## Programming
Programming for FUDCons is extremely important. In 2016 one event
was
run as a Bar Camp and the other was run as a programmed event at a
Bar
Camp. While Bar Camp voting should result in the conference that
people
want to attend, that also means that the speakers need to be talking
about topics that matter to the audience. In the case of a
programmed
event, this is also critical.
Therefore programming at FUDCons should be based on the goals and
target
audience, not just based on which Fedora contributors want to
attend.
Ideally the proposal should include the kinds of topics that will be
presented and even a provisional list of speakers who will be
approached.
## Funded Attendance and Costs
To increase the number of activities, we should cleanly divorce
FUDCons
from Regional FADs. FUDCons are necessarily a reason to fly in
contributors from all over a region or the world. Let's keep them
locally focused. Depending on the goals and target audience all of
the
speakers do not even need to be Fedora contributors. For example, a
non-Fedora contributor speaking about Eclipse (on Fedora) at a
developer
focused FUDCon may make a lot of sense.
Therefore I believe that budgets should trend toward the smaller side
with an emphasis on impact being directly related to budget size. To
give some (highly contrived) examples, a +1 day event for FOSDEM may
have a large budget because the event needs good publicity to draw
the
huge attendance opportunity from those attending FOSDEM. A +1 day
event
for DevConf.cz may have a small budget because we have a friendly
environment for advertising and a ton of local contributors to help
with
programming. A +1 day event for FISL may need a medium size budget
because of the need to fly in Spanish speaking presenters for some
sessions. (These are just examples, don't read into them.)
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