Open Stack

Hi Nicolae,

On Wed, 2015-03-18 at 16:57 -0700, Nicolae Paladi wrote:
> as a meetup organiser I often have issues finding quality speakers
> (well known issue) and also sponsors for the meetup (also known but
> less spoken about).

Yep, these are common requests and I apologize for the time it's taking
to satisfy them. 

There is an ongoing development effort called 'Speaker bureau' managed
by the openstack-org team. If you noticed, people submitting a talk for
the past and current Summit had the option to check a box asking them if
they wanted their name to be listed as speakers for user groups. 

Those details, afaik, have been collected in the openstack-org database,
whose code is now published on
https://github.com/OpenStackweb/openstack-org (waiting to be fully
pulled into openstack-infra). 

What's missing to display the Speaker Bureau to user groups is a query
to the openstack org DB and php code to display results. The code and
the database schema is public: if you know PHP and SilverStripe you can
help speed up this project.

Another way to help is to write a blueprint and spec for this, to lay
out a plan and solicit help to get it executed.

>	* Companies: contact person, type of sponsorship, comments.

I'm on the fence about this for two reasons. In practice, user groups
have a local focus so even if you know the name of a contact person at
company X, offering office space and pizza for a group in Germany, that
contact may not be interested to help you find a colleague to offer the
same in Sweden. On the other hand, the small local firm Y offering
meeting space and pizza in Sweden wouldn't have any office outside of
such country.

The other reason is that I don't think institutionalizing the
relationship between user groups and sponsors is good. It's better for
the community to keep that relationship casual and ad-hoc. I think the
user groups should be "safe" places where people can go to learn things
without necessarily becoming marketing leads. Sponsors are useful but we
should always remember that successful user groups are made by users,
not sponsors. The primary objective of user groups should be to
establish a solid base of people willing to meet to share their
experiences, help themselves and others. If they have pizza for free or
chip in $20 to buy some it shouldn't matter too much.

That said, the list of members of OpenStack is public and there is a
public mailing list of marketing people where I think occasional
requests for sponsorship can be made (at least until they become so
frequent they become annoying :)). 

Thoughts?

/stef