ApacheCon Experiments
Another ApacheCon for the history books. I’m sitting here in the New Orleans airport enjoying the free wireless. These conferences are always a blur of activity, so it’s nice to take a moment and figure out what just happened.
This year’s ApacheCon was full of experiments. The OFBiz project ran their own user symposium and in talking to several of the OFBiz committers, they seemed pleased with the result. Attendance was moderate, enough for the one track they had, but they definitely had a more international audience than previous OFBiz events. Personally, I was hoping the co-located event would give other Apache developers a chance to learn more about OFBiz and in that sense, I feel the event was a success. Expect to see more cooperation between OFBiz and other ASF projects, including the infrastructure team.
One of the more interesting experiments was the BarCamp Apache on Tuesday. We tried to drag the hackathon hackers out of their room to join other New Orleans locals for Apache’s first unconference. whurley and Denise Cooper led the efforts to organize the barcamp. The hightlight was of course Jukka’s introduction to git, but there were around 20 other discussions ranging from Microsoft’s M language to how to run developer events to the financial crisis. BarCamp Apache felt different from many other barcamps I’ve been at and I suppose being at a five star hotel will do that. In fact, the day felt more like a track of Birds of a Feather sessions and I suppose that’s a decent way to describe what a barcamp can be like. I think we’re going to try this format again in other ApacheCons, so if anyone has any feedback, please let the planners know.
I was really hoping to attend the Hadoop Camp which was standing room only for many of the sessions. However, I’ve found that being on the conference committee, handling the ApacheCon website, and following up on board and treasury work leaves me little time to actually enjoy the conference sessions. So for all those who got to attend the Hadoop Camp, I’m jealous. Let me know how it went, okay?
Somewhere during the conference I did manage present three very different times. On Wednesday I gave my Making Sense of Open Source License talk. Thursday I threw together a lightning talk and after enough groveling, Fitz allowed me to use slides. Finally on Friday I gave a “lunch session” talk. The original idea for these lunch sessions was to have a roundtable discussion with attendees interested in the topic. That format was abandoned on Wednesday, so my lunch session turned into a mini-keynote on The Apache Way.
After the closing of the conference, I joined 20 some other ApacheCon attendees on Saturday to assist Beacon of Hope in building a fence for a New Orleans resident still recovering from Katrina. Amazingly enough, we were able to put the fence up within one day without too many mishaps. We only had to take down crooked boards once.
So that was the ApacheCon 2008 experiment – dedicated project tracks, barcamp, volunteer day, live streaming of sessions, an open hackathon and plenty more. Next year is the foundation’s 10th anniversary and the I expect we’ll see an even more adventurous event. See you there.
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