Advice from Bjorn

There are a number of hard things about putting on a conference.

The first is designing a format that is good enough for managers to spend money sending people to it. Tutorials are often a big draw for managers ("oh, my people will learn something!"). Technical talks are too ("oh, my people will learn something").

The second is designing a format that is interesting for attendees. This is different from item one. The interesting for attendees is lots of demos, lots of interactions, lots of conversations. Lecture style talks are not that interesting to anyone but the most junior attendees because the rate of information flow is so slow. BOFs, (real) workshops, lunch conversations, ... that kind of thing is where the interesting content is.

The third is operationally putting it together. Of course Nancy can help with that and experience is useful. Keeping the budget small enough to make it ok to come is hard. Don't have goodies. Another trick is to have the base price be low and then charge extra for food, etc. - that way the manager sees "oh, $395 for the conference, sure" and then "another $200 for food, ok" rather than "$595 for the conference - no way!".

Advice from Susan

TOPICS to be covered

We should not dismiss topics before we get submissions. Based on the provided input I think it is important to cover all business segments that we already have on our radar (smart home, automotive, mobile, enterprise) and leave it to the submissions which topics they want to cover in technical sessions and tutorials. Regarding business models, I am often asked for remote management, so I believe we should include this topic in one of the tutorials.

We also need to ensure that open source doesn't dominate the conference. We have real business solutions in the market or still in R&D that would provide perfect input for discussions between the participants (see also the survey feedback).

TUTORIALS

I want to stir up people to submit to make the dev con as live as possible. I suggest to wait for input from the mancommunity - apart from the key note we need to open up for submissions instead of determining the tutors upfront.

LOCATION

Based on the input that the majority still would prefer a European event I would like to discuss two dev cons instead of one - one in Europe, could be aligned with ApacheCon Europe e.g., and one with EclipseCon in Santa Clara. In any case we need to make sure that our positioning isn't blurred by the alignment with other events. We still need to come across as a cross-industry consortium that offers a horizontal modular component platform, enabling the delivery of a broad variety of services and applications as well as the integration of diverse standards.

Tracks versus Conference

One further comment on the side conference vs. the track conference. I see Bj's reasons for a track conference but don't want too closely align with EclipseCon. This would narrow our objectives and would make Eclipse (or other open source projects) predominant. We should, as I already mentioned, strive for business-related presentations out of the different business segments plus tutorials that provide OSGi knowledge at various levels and - maybe - related to a specific segment, if there's an adequate tutor, e.g. Bostrom or Severi for Mobile.

It's fully clear to me that the OSGiA needs to financially commit. That's one of the reasons why we postponed the dev con to 2007. I already have asked for first input from Dipti regarding the budget, because i expect a different budgeting than per Peter's suggestions if we want to promote the dev con adequately. Even co-branding is more than sending out invites and posting the program on a web site.

Before taking a decision we definitely should clarify whether the Osgi dev con fee has been considered an extra-fee in the questionnaire.