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
