Hi Tom, My suggestion would be: On 07/15/2013 03:45 AM, Tom Fifield wrote:
1) Format of event - a dedicated event, or possibly tied in with another conference
A single day of sessions with experts, which would be repeated for each venue. It is possible that for certain topics, a local expert would be better to have a smaller number of people travelling.
2) Who are the people? Foundation Staff? PTL? Core Developers? Other? ==> Need to know this before organising the event ==> Posting on openstack-dev may be the next step?
I would invite people covering both the technical and commercial universe surrounding OpenStack - covering an introduction to OpenStack & IaaS, Nova, storage, networking & network services, service orchestration, emerging technologies (measurement, provisioning, image services, ...) Then, plan the road show for the week after the Summit, with an event every second day in SW Asia - this would be a considerable time commitment for the people involved, so it would make sense for the foundation & organisers to sponsor both accommodation and travel for the speakers. This also would require of participants to basically take 2 weeks leave from their companies, families & other duties, so I can imagine that many potential participants will not be eager to sign up. I can imagine that some potential participants would be interested if it were a client engagement, so perhaps a budget to pay some speakers would be appropriate too?
3) How to get the experts to come ==> Maybe: hosting the event in a holiday area, or encouraging them to have a holiday there ==> Maybe: asking the Foundation, or other sponsors for some funding for airfares/accommodation
I think that sponsoring flights é accommodation (for the type of format I'm proposing) is common decency. The big issue would be whether you will be able to find people to take so much time out of their lives, especially after already taking a week to be in Hong Kong. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary - Community Action and Impact Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13