RFC: OsmoDevCon 2017 planning

Dear Osmocom Community, [please respect the Reply-To and post all follow-up discussion to this to openbsc(a)lists.osmocom.org, so we avoid having long threads cross-posted to several mailing lists.] 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(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)