As a data point, this model has worked fantastically well for PyCon. There are national, regional, state and city conferences. Some have PSF sponsorship, some others just marketing and some wholly self-sufficient. They vary in length and size. Some single-day, single-track, others week long, multi-track. The key is empowering and supporting the local teams.

While in the subject of CFP process, I feel before you implement double-blind or any scheme to improve selection, you must improve the CFP itself. One the one hand we ask proposers to be thorough on the other hand we only allow 900 *characters*. I don’t think any selection committee can make a truly judicious selection of proposals based on 3 tweets’ worth of abstract. I’ve seen this same pattern of short proposal abstract in a different conference I was track chair for; it wasn’t pretty and this should be fixed as priority 0 for next cncf/kubecons, IMO.

Best,

Ruben

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 10:24 AM Matt Farina <matt@...> wrote:

The CNCF site notes:

"The Cloud Native Computing Foundation builds sustainable ecosystems and fosters
a community around a constellation of high-quality projects that orchestrate
containers as part of a microservices architecture."

If we want to foster community around these technologies the end-users need to far outpace the vendors or projects. Successful open source projects often have a community of users where only a small fraction are even publicly engaged in the project.

Meetups aren’t enough to foster cloud native computing in local markets. 

WordCamp, DrupalCamp, and devops days are good examples of local conferences that helped grow the ecosystem.

When it comes to growing ecosystems WordPress is a great example. It powers 31.9% of the web. No matter what we think of the technology the approach around it does have some lessons.

For several years there was a conference in Ohio called CloudDevelop. It was a local/regional conference with most people being local. It was about cloud development, mostly with traditional IaaS. Several hundred people would attend. Many of whom worked for banks, insurance companies, school districts, and other places like these. Most of them wouldn’t travel to the big conferences but what they learned and shared here was valuable and helped expand the use and understanding of cloud. These same people often won’t attend meetups because they have family responsibilities and other things going on in their evenings.

-- 
Matt Farina
mattfarina.com

On Oct 4, 2018, at 9:33 AM, Camille Fournier <skamille@...> wrote:

Meetups are nice but not at all a substitute for a good end-user focused conference, so let's please not conflate the two things.

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018, 9:25 AM Chris Aniszczyk <caniszczyk@...> wrote:

Thanks for pointing those out. As Dan mentioned, it's on the agenda for 2019 to support some smaller more regional events in new geos.

Currently we encourage folks to start a join an existing meetup, we have over 150+ worldwide:

Meetups: http://meetups.cncf.io/

We have been deliberately reaching out to folks all over the world and the program has been growing every month since its inception (instructions on how to create a meetup here: https://github.com/cncf/meetups)

We also have an ambassador program where we support folks that run meetups or speak at a variety of conferences that we may not be able to get too: https://www.cncf.io/people/ambassadors/

So in short, we're definitely looking to fill in the gaps next year and this is something I suggest you engage with the CNCF Marketing Committee, which is chaired by Mark Coleman: https://www.cncf.io/people/marketing-committee/

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 9:12 AM Matt Farina <matt@...> wrote:

Has anyone looked at the WordCamp model for local conferences? They are somewhere in between a KubeCon and a meetup.

There are several benefits to this model like:

• They are local and can be on work time. Meetups cut into evenings and are short. Large conferences require travel. As someone outside a tech bubble city I see the appeal for locals.
• It builds up local ecosystem of cloud native folks. In particular end-users
• These local conferences are a great way for people to learn and hone speaking skills so they have the confidence to do a great job at the larger ones
• It helps build more and more capable end users

They aren’t hard to organize.

-- 
Matt Farina
mattfarina.com

--

Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) | +1-512-961-6719