Questionaire
We asked people about an OSGi conference and got 53 responses, of which 52 intend to attend any OSGi congress. This is not a typical random sample, but it indicates what people would like to see.
The preferred time is autumn, closely followed by spring. Interestingly, the preferred location is middle or south Europe. However, when they have to choose the co-location there is a significant preference for Javaone and then EclipseCon, which both are west coast conferences. ECOOP is a European conference but it was not popular. Other choices were Apache Europe, Apache USA, OOPSLA, and ECOOP. There was one suggestion to co-locate with CES, which we could do with CCNC
The preference for duration is 2 days. 3 days is acceptable but they dislike the idea of 1 day. Someone suggested to not overlap but use adjoining days when the conference is co-located.
The price that people are willing to pay averaged out at $550.
Subjects that are deemed interesting (most interesting first):
- Mobile
- Real Life Deployments
- Experience Reports
- OSGi R5
- Embedded
- Demonstrations
- Configurability
There were a few other subjects mentioned:
- Scripting
- .NET
- Enterprise/Server side
- Eclipse
- UPnP, Control networks Multimedia Software, Media centers
- Where does OSGi stand
- SOA frameworks
- JSR 291/232/277
- Spring
- Jini
- RFID
We asked for suggestions for speakers. The following people were mentioned:
- Martin Fowler
- Joel Spolsky Fog Creek www.fogcreek.com
- Rebecca Wirfs-Brock www.wirfs-brock.com
- People doing component development researches at Universities.
- any development tools provider
- Peter Kriens Jeff McAffer Richard Hall
- Peter Kriens Jon Bostrom people from companies who have success stories built upon OSGi
- Rick Hall
- We (Telcordia) might be able to invite somebody from automotive or other industry with real-life deployment experience
- Jim Waldo
- Peter Jeff McAffer
For panels we got the following suggestions:
- Going beyond simple use cases
- BJ Hargrave Jeff McAffer
- Peter Kriens BJ Hargrave Richard S Hall Jon Bostrom ...
- Nokia on Mobile
- J2EE
- Real-life deployment
- Management Architecture and Distribution Framework for Home Network Services/Akihiro Tsutsui(NTT)
- Open Source R5 features/focus OSGi/JSRs/JCP
- bundle builders extending framework
We also asked about tutorials. Looking at the normal response, tutorials were seen as quite positive and there were a surprising number of suggestions. The following suggestions were made for the subjects:
- Real life examples
- How all services in the spec's are meant to be used.
- Basics, getting started
- Configuration, metadata, implications, more complicated dependencies (from factories, services, introspection etc.)
- Utilize the SDKs in the IDEs, Development tools
- Eclipse development using the various OSGi specs
- Mobile Security Deployment, Developing mobile related bundles
- Performance and scale
- Experience of implementing and details of specification
- Optimizing embedded OSGi
- Advanced Development. Best Practices.
- Management and provisioning. Deployment and Product packaging
- Declarative Services
- Distributed programming on OSGi
- Web components
There were 12 people that would be willing to propose a tutorial.
The cost of a tutorial averaged out on 200 dollars. We asked if we should use the tutorials to subsidize the conference, pay the tutors, or make the tutorials cheaper. Free was obvious the choice but a clear second choice is to pay the tutors.
We asked also if companies were willing to sponsor. To my surprise there were quite a few. We asked them to give en email address to contact:
- marie@cesar.org.br
- marcel.offermans@luminis.nl
- lapiotis@research.telcordia.com
- IBM
- ingerun@syrensoftware.se
- thor.wolpert@maximusbc.ca
Additionally, there were some other suggestions made:
- Preferably many smaller sessions in parallel possibly repeated and possibly multi-phased for larger subjects.
- The key is to design a conference that gets people talking. Paid tutorials are ok but they have to be really really good; I'm thinking of switching EclipseCon to free tutorials this next year because the quality isn't good enough.
- Please keep them (speakers ed.) relevant to the discussion. Some of the EclipseCon keynotes were funny but for that I can watch Comedy Central. At a conference I'm all about the tech.
Summary
Where Co-locate Santa Clara, EclipseCon 2007 Mar 5-8
Duration 2 days
Price $600 (should get a discount with EclipseCon)
Tutorials Combined with EclipseCon
Tutorial price Same as EclipseCon
Break Even 75 paid attendees
Expected 120 paid attendees
Speakers 30 (free OSGi registration, discount EclipseCon)