Proposal: Shane's Ideas For ACUS08

Half Shane's ideas, half an agenda for our planning meeting. Here are some pre-coffee "Shane's Rules" for the conference.

Rule # 1: have a better network. Rule # 2: ensure Shane's email doesn't fail in the middle of the conference. Rule # 3: Hackathon must be free for committers. (for this show)(undecided about token charge for non-committers) Rule # 4: marketing must improve, both formal (PR firms) and informal (getting trainers and PMCs to be effective) Rule # 5: keynote speakers must be interesting. Rule # 5a: one of the keynote speakers must be involved with a non-profit or other charitable institution: how the ASF's geek work affects the real world.

Shane's vision: a semi-traditional ApacheCon

Given everything (including contracts, and current volunteers) I don't have the imagination for a completely different ApacheCon US 2008 - although I want to push hard for experimentation with one/two tracks of FFT, Community, Meetup, PMC focus, whatever tracks.

• Do a committer survey of attitudes towards hackathon (space and price issues), conference content, and PMC-led meetup activities.
• Do a followup email to ACEU08 attendees asking for feedback, invitation to future shows.
• Get speaker evals back ASAP. This is really bugging me.
• Get much better at individual followups: we should (carefully and politely) follow up with all past attendees and CFP submitters from the past two years with any new show announcements. (Figure out opt-out methods)
  
  
• Keep 2 day trainings. Work on improving the "certificate of attendance" they can hand out.
• Work hard at getting focused tracks to draw specific attendees. Work hard at marketing them independently!
• Work hard at organizing tracks within days, and where/who keynoters are to increase individual day appeal.
  
  
• Hackathon co-located at event. All invited.
• Fifth half-room space devoted to FFT and community-focused semi-structured talks.
• Provide at least guidelines and "stamp of you should feel empowered" to all PMCs who want to hold their own Meetups.
• Ensure that any registered Meetups (i.e. a PMC told us about it) have some sort of cross-marketing with us (even if just back-links)
  
• Solicit SpamAssassin to do a day of content & training. Have someone who knows them personally contact them.
• Solicit OFBiz to do a day of content & training.
• Solicit several other newer communities " ditto ".