Open Stack

Greetings.

Excited to see the speakers bureau, up and running soon. Our teams are on
Java, Python, Ruby, and Go; funny, no PHP in the last few years. Would have
loved to ask for help from some of them. :D

On sponsors relationships, while I truly agree that a blurry line should
separate it to keep things vibrant and un-"bullied" by big names, it is a
can't-live-with-them and can't-live-without-them situation.

In our case, Philippines (although we are lately more active in ASEAN
(HK/SG)), from 4+ years ago till now, there has been zero (0) corporate
sponsorship/support from either technology vendor and/or enterprise.

They will both drive their primacy and exclusivity over everyone else
(especially industry competitor) or they give nothing. A clear business
case and market/brand strategy was constantly requested from us. While
there was value in providing these, and we ourselves having some directions
on promoting the community, it becomes a deadlock after some time; or
everyone just does their own thing or nothing.

We once tried to initiate a free half-day seminar, for developers, to
introduce OpenStack Community Version as well as guidance on then
challenging installation steps. The reception had been a bit cold (which
hotel is it held? is the food good? are there any swags and souvenirs? any
celebrity). Pizzas and drinks for half a day in a cafe for a free
seminar/meetup did not work for us.

I guess you can argue the maturity of market is missing and we're reaching
out to the wrong groups of people or places. We'll keep trying.

A true interested and passionate local community will simply pitch in,
individually, if no else does. Maybe regional linkages and support would
also help.


*Thank you and good day, Dean Marc.*
Director - Engineering | Design | Innovations


*HK - Dungeon Innovations Pvt. Ltd.*
Bonham Trade Centre, 50 Bonham Strand, Sheung Wan
+852 81 913 409

*PH - Dungeon Innovations*
49 Annapolis Street, Greenhills, San Juan City, 1500
+63 920 2928888 | +63 2 7440320


http://www.twitter.com/deanmarc
http://www.twitter.com/javasparks
http://www.twitter.com/DungeonInn
http://www.twitter.com/citidotio


On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 1:54 AM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano at openstack.org>
wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Community mailing list
> Community at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/community/attachments/20150320/624cc6f1/attachment-0001.html>