Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona?

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1: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona?
Posted by Frank Bergmann on 11/28/05 06:49 PM

Hi,

We are thinking about organizing an OpenACS / ]project-open[ conference in Barcelona, Spain in May 2006.

  • Location:
    Some 30km north of Barcelona, Spain, in a beautify Break of Century Villa (www.latorregran.com)
  • Date:
    May 27th and May 28st. Maybe some people might want to come earlier, because the best parties are on Thursday and Friday...
  • Price:
    ~60 EUR/night including breakfeast, lunch, conference (hacking) rooms and a reception or something similar.

Our last conference in 2001 was pretty OK, but this time the setting could be just incredible. Barcelona is located in the center of Europe (atleast in terms of cheap Airline flights) and end of May is a beautiful time here with lots of sun usually.

However, I don't see how we (]project-open[) would be able to organize the conference contents. So we would leave this for the community. I don't know how this usually works, but I guess that there might be some talks, some tutorials and some hands-on bug bashing? There are several conference rooms in the hotel (see photos above), so that several sessions can run in parallel.

Apart from that we plan to prepare some ]project-open[ specific tutorials on Monday the 29th, mainly for users and partners of ]project-open[, but obviously open for everybody.

The hotel has about 60 beds, so the number of participants would be somehow limited. WLAN is available in the conference rooms and part of the hotel, but the speed is somehow limited (probably OK for mail, but not for working on remote computers).

What do you think? I'm not sure whether this mix of OpenACS and ]project-open[ is fine for you. Please give me feedback. This is just a proposal.

Bests,
Frank

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2: Re: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona? (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 12/01/05 01:21 PM
The idea for the bootcamp is excellent, but I'm a little bit concerned about internet connectivity especially when viewing this against the alternative of spending the EUR 60 for a hotel near a university and use the universities resources for achieving this. But, if university resources are to be used it remains to be seen how much P/O there can be (in contrast to .LRN).

Either way, if I'm not drown by client work or in Jordan, I'd come and join you for a couple of days.

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3: Re: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona? (response to 1)
Posted by Ciaran De Buitlear on 12/02/05 11:02 AM
Hi,
I'll try and clear things here so I can go. Frank I'll leave it to you whether you want me to do a talk on something - I'm not sure if there's anything I know that would be of particular interest to the audience. Malte Does Peter Andre suspect?
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4: Re: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona? (response to 1)
Posted by Tracy Adams on 12/02/05 11:27 AM
I'd be glad to do the training/bootcamp part - getting a nice training path step by step is one of my goals to do early next year.
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5: Re: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona? (response to 1)
Posted by Simon at TCB on 12/02/05 12:41 PM
Perhaps given some of the comments in this discussion

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=339547

rather than run a boot camp/training session you might consider splitting into a two part event.

From our perspective we wouldn't really be interested in training as we've been using OpenACS for some years and I guess that will be true of quite a few people, however we would be very interested in meeting up with other companies, organisations and possibly even customers/users of OpenACS.

Perhaps the first day could be commercially rather than technically oriented. With the second day given over to entirely technical/bootcamp material.

Some things I'd like to see on an agenda might be discussions or presentations on:

  • Commercial approaches to OpenACS
  • Market position and exposure. how to increase and improve
  • Customer experiences of living with OpenACS, good and bad.
  • OpenAcs in an enterprise architecture. What could it do, where could it compete.
  • Case studies. Unusual uses. etc.
  • Making OpenAcs enterprise-friendly
  • Leveraging other technologies; integration ideas.
  • Are we hitting the 'buzz buttons', SOA, IOC, Agile, Distributed etc etc...

    Or anything more intersting that anyone can suggest.

    Barcelona is great place to go at that time of year (well at any time really) and I'm sure there might be some interest.

    Also, when we ran a bootcamp in Bath some years ago we felt that in hindsight two days of technical was a bit much given the wide ranging audience and also for me the most interesting bits wer Eve's anecdotes about experiences with customers and projects.

    I guess it would only be worth doing if there were sufficient numbers however. I guess maybe more than for a training course?

    What do you think?

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    6: Re: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona? (response to 1)
    Posted by Frank Bergmann on 12/02/05 07:40 PM
    Hi,

    Sounds interesting, a "business friendly" (thanks Caroline!) OpenACS meeting, together with great tutorials from Tracy at the second day.

    We developed the initial idea for this meeting when we thought about inviting ]project-open[ customers and partners to Barcelona. So maybe this could be an interesting proposition for other organizations as well: Invite your users to this meeting and take this into account when designing the agenda?

    So maybe we would get to a 3-day structure like this:

    1. Day, Saturday 27th, "Business Day": Talks around OpenACS and customer's organizations. This would be targeted to OpenACS consulting companies. Maybe a parallel "Bug Bashing track" for those not interested in the business stuff?

    2. Day, Sunday 28th, "Tutorial Day": An Intro session, FormBuilder, Contracts, Permissions, The "Offical OpenACS Programming Style"(?), ... This section would be targeted to OpenACS developers and newbies from both OpenACS "sellers" and "buyers".

    3. Day, Monday 29th, "Customer's Day": We would organize some tutorials particularly for ]po[ users and partners such as "]po[ financial model", "file server integration", etc. Maybe other organizations may want to organize a similar program for their customers, partners, ...?

    We would definitely be willing to share our experiences about marketing and selling OpenACS based services. The question is how to do this in the most appropriate way. Maybe each company could give a brief overview (case) how they sell their services and their difficulties?

    The agenda items from Simon (above) sound very interesting. I would add from our perspective some possible topics:

    - "Red Tape" vs. "Code Sharing": Where are the differences, limits and chances of organizations collaborating in an OSS community as compared to individuals (discussing the ideas from Caroline)?
    - GUI and Usability
    - Windows and other installers, preconfigured demo systems
    - Implementation and rollout methodologies (we'd be willing to share ours)

    Just ideas, everything open still...

    Bests,
    Frank

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    7: Re: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona? (response to 1)
    Posted by Alfred Essa on 12/02/05 08:37 PM
    What about a joint OpenACS/.LRN conference?
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    8: Re: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona? (response to 1)
    Posted by Frank Bergmann on 12/02/05 09:14 PM
    Hi Al,

    Actually, I already asumed that .LRN or atleast some of it's members would participate... I think that I emphasised the openness. The only constraint would be the number of available rooms in the hotel (~60 beds).

    What do you think about his "business" or "customer focus"? How would you see the effect on the agenda?

    Again: Our initial(!) idea was to bring in some customers, "introduce" them to the "community", and provide them with some relatively easy to digest OpenACS agenda. Some technical stuff, but not too much.

    Bests,
    Frank

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    9: Re: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona? (response to 1)
    Posted by Rafael Calvo on 12/05/05 02:04 AM
    Frank
    Isn't there another hotel near by? so the load can be shared.

    cheers

    Rafael

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    10: Re: OpenACS Conference on May 27/28th 2006 in Barcelona? (response to 1)
    Posted by Caroline Meeks on 12/28/05 01:08 AM
    Hi Frank,

    How is conference planning going? Is it still on? When should we reserve rooms?

    Thanks