From laforge at gnumonks.org  Sat Dec 10 19:11:39 2016
From: laforge at gnumonks.org (Harald Welte)
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2016 20:11:39 +0100
Subject: RFC: OsmoDevCon 2017 planning
Message-ID: <20161210191139.rxtzqrdmsifwgi4s@nataraja>

Dear Osmocom Community,

[please respect the Reply-To and post all follow-up discussion to this
 to openbsc at lists.osmocom.org, so we avoid having long threads
 cross-posted to several mailing lists.]

>From 2012 to 2016 we were running a series of small, invitation-only
Osmocom Developer Conferences.  Access was intentionally restricted
to those community members who have demonstrated an existing track
record of contribution to any of the projects under the Osmocom
umbrella.

This format of a small, tightly knit group of about 20 people has been
successful over the years, and I have received a lot of positive
feedback from past participants.

On the other hand, the Osmocom project has grown in scope and diversity,
and some of those projects don't have all that much relationship to each
other - except being started by people from within the same group.
There's the cellular communications (GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS and hopefully at
some point LTE) protocols which is attracting a lot of professional
users.  And then there's pure community projects like rtl-sdr,
OsmocomBB, OsmocomGMR and many other efforts.

Particularly the cellular infrastructure projects (OsmoBTS, OsmoPCU,
OsmoBTS, OsmoNITB, OsmoSGSN, OpenGGSN, OsmoIuh & co) are somehow
"standing out" of the othe projects in the context of having a wider
user bsae, and in that user base also primarily commercial users.

So I'd like to start a discussion on how to possibly change the event
format to accomodate the various interests and parties.  I definitely
don't want to loose the "annual meeting of old friends" atmosphere,
while at the same time also opening up to other interested parties.

One idea would be to keep OsmoDevCon as-is and have a separate event
where non-contributing/developing users / sysadmins / system integrators
could also be attending.

Another idea would be to split into a 'user day' and 'developer days'
format.  This is something the netfilter developer workshops have been
using for many years, and from my limited insight quite successfully so.
The "user day" is more like a traditional tech conference, with a large
auditorium and talks oriented towards users / sysadmins / integrators of
the software.  The "developer days" are the invitation-only part, for
known contributing developers only, similar to what we have at
OsmoDevCon.

Having both events (or both parts of an event) back-to-back has the
advantage that a large number of potential speakers for the 'user day'
are already present, and they don't have to travel yet another time.

One could even structure it further and say we have one user day, one
public 'Osmocom cellular developer day' and then the closed 'OsmoDevCon
classic', maybe reduced from 4 days to 3 or even 2 days only?

What is the general opinion about this?

Are there people lurking on this list who would be interested in
attending a public 'user day' or even 'developer day' about the Osmocom
cellular projects, with presentations and workshops around topics such
as running Osmocom based cellular networks?

In terms of when/where, I would suggest to keep the tradition of April
in Berlin/Germany.  But I'm of course very happy if somebody wants to
host it some place else...

Regards, and looking forward to meeting you [again] in 2017,
	Harald

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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