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Vincent Untz 12/06/12 3:20 PM >>> Now, SUSE is offering us to do something similar in 2013. Of course, we'd need to move fast if we want to do that (as the venue needs to be secured for additional days). There have been people suggesting that we should also have a booth during SUSECon, or even suggesting that our openSUSE presence should happen during SUSECon (as part of it?) to decrease the amount of work needed for the organization.

I really enjoyed Summit, and it greatly exceeded my expectations. That said, there were a number of issues which detracted from it's potential Having it just after SUSEcon led to lots of that events attendees, sponsors, and SUSE employees leaving before the summit started. I think this was a missed opportunity for SUSE to 'show-off' how important openSUSE is to them, and for the non-SUSE openSUSE community to make contacts and build bridges with the wider 'SUSE-ecosystem' This left Summit as a small but enjoyable 'mini-oSC', a little easier for our North American community members to attend, but primarily attended by regular Geekos, many of whom also attend other FOSS and openSUSE events As enjoyable as it was, I don't see what summit brought to the table that those other events don't already. Even with a bigger gap between the two events, I'm nervous about there being a dilution effect if Summit and Conference have similar goals. I think conference should be our primary community event, focused on the community and it's needs, stuffed with the best talks, possibly in the model of oSC 11 (ie. Shove a few hundred Geekos in a building and let the magic happen) I think Summit's great potential is to be our 'window to the business world' event. SUSEcon to me seems to be SUSE's big corporate, partners & marketing shindig, with SUSE screaming 'look at us, we're big, we're awesome', filling up customers and attendees brains with as much information as possible about the SUSE world. I think openSUSE needs to be an integral part of that. We're an important part of what SUSE do, arguably more so than any other partner, so at the very least, even if Summit continues as a separate event, I'd like to see an openSUSE booth, ideally staffed with both SUSE and non-SUSE contributors to openSUSE. I also think, instead of a separate summit event, I'd like to see an openSUSE track at SUSEcon with sessions focusing on the bleeding edge (ie. stuff not yet in SLE) and gaining new contributors (how your business can use OBS, how to submit patches, etc). The logic being to grab the interest of SUSEcon's audience and could hopefully lead to some of them getting involved with openSUSE That said, I realise my proposal has one major flaw - As a corporate event SUSEcons price tag of $999 puts it well out of reach of most openSUSE community members who may want attend just for the openSUSE track. That's something we'd need to think about, but I don't think its insurmountable, or worst case, it just means we have to do a better job of encouraging their attendance to oSC and making it as internationally accessible as we can. That's my 2c/2p - Rich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org