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@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
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