Moin,
On 08.06.2015 19:52, Robert Schweikert wrote:
On 06/08/2015 08:58 AM, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
On 03.06.2015 18:33, Robert Schweikert wrote:
- While in the end we had a good turn out at oSC15, it took a
herculean effort to get there and I would say we did not meet the goal of having "..a significant number of contributors gather..".
True, the more significant question is why is that so?
I think at least part of the answer is in the responses in the thread "letter to people not accepted to be a member" that jdd started
- Travel is expensive
- Other priorities, family, other hobbies,....
- One may have to take vacation
And that was that much different in 2013? I doubt that...
There is certainly no universal answer.
I'm pretty sure there are universal aspects we can change so people lean more on the side of going to oSC despite their personal difficulties like money, vacation or whatnot. If we want to continue we should figure out what those aspects are.
Given that the published videos get a good number of viewing I'd also say that the content is interesting to people.
Obviously not interesting enough for an on-site visit which is our 'problem'.
Therefore, I would say that if we want to have more contributors from around the world join we probably have to do better on the money front with TSP potentially covering more of the travel expenses.
Sounds like one of the things we could try yes. Cheaper to reach places with cheaper options to spend the night (without airbeds) might be another thing. Or group travel arrangements like we do from Nürnberg. Early bird tickets with Hotel vouchers. There are tons of things you can try for the travel 'issue' alone.
- The most recent oSCs required an unbelievable effort by a very
small group of people.
I think the question we should ask ourselves is how can we make this a little less grueling than it is now.
I agree. The answer is probably more structure, i.e. e recipe that someone can follow.
For instance. For now it was also up to the organizers to rally the openSUSE community (admins, promotion, news, video team) to help them with the event, we could make sure that those teams have recipes too.
It will still be hard.
Like I've said, it'll never be easy...
As it stands today we have almost no marketing and promotion of the project and thus for oSC
Yeah that one is a heavy burden on every good deed we do :-/ And I don't really see anyone that is interested in changing this. Not even SUSE...
those that organize the event also have to do that part
There are tons of things we leave organizers alone with. I guess this stems from oSC{11,12,13} where we had huge pools of community members that we could let handle everything alone. But for oSC{14,15} I must say that I'm personally ashamed of the level of "support" our community provided to Svebor and Hans. You can't admire/thank them enough for bull-dozing through this tremendous task anyway :-/
- Should we strive to change the charter/nature of oSC and brand
it more as a "FOSS conference organized by the openSUSE project"
I fail to understand what this would change for us as a community? Can you elaborate?
oSC by the openSUSE Community for the openSUSE community
vs.
oSC by the openSUSE Community for the FOSS community
But that would also mean that you have to make the event interesting to the FOSS community. I doubt that we can pull this off (all general FOSS events except FOSDEM struggle to attract people) and I still fail to see the benefit for us.
- What prevents people from contributing to the organization of
oSC?
I think that throwing inexperienced openSUSE/oSC organizers at it every year, giving them next to no directions and no structural support is the cause.
Agreed a better structure would definitely help. How can we build this structure?
Figure out who we need/can involve, then sit down and come up with one. How about a Hackathon?
Henne