Jenkins : Proposal - Revisiting JUC in 2016

In 2016, CloudBees would like to change the way it produces Jenkins User Conference events. As JUC has been the flagship event for our community to meet, we'd like to get the blessing of this change in the project meeting.

Problems

Today, CloudBees produces 4 JUCs world-wide, each costing well over $100,000s. That's a lot of money, and it's not sustainable in the current form.

Also, there are more commercial interests around Jenkins now, and this has created some friction. Some attendees were expecting sessions from fellow open-source Jenkins users (in the FOSDEM or SCALE style) and got vendors talking about their services or products instead. Vendors have the opposite frustration. They feel they have a relevant content, but felt uneasy talking about them, afraid of upsetting OSS-minded audience.

Proposal

Jenkins World

Instead of having 4 JUCs that had to be produced separately, let's create ONE BIG PARTY for everything Jenkins related. This is a 3-day annual world-wide event in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we historically had biggest JUCs. Attendee target is 1250-2000.

The intent is to make this all inclusive; anything related to Jenkins is all welcome, including users, contributors, vendors, and people from a broader ecosystem. It's better to have one big show like that instead of having many smaller ones for different audience.

This will be an event where a critical mass of Jenkins developers get together. We'd like to set aside some time for us to discuss strategies, directions, critical APIs and other important community matters among ourselves, like we did for a few years in FOSDEM but at a bigger scale. To facilitate this, under the proposal, CloudBees is setting aside $30K for travel grants to fly in key people to this event from all over the world. We should be able to fully cover the air+hotel cost for a dozen or so people with this much money.

To prevent frictions around OSS vs commercial interests, inside the event we want to clearly separate the community open-source part from the vendor parts. The proposal calls for 3 tracks:

  • JUC Community Track: this track is run by the community and there won't be any vendor sessions. The new event team should organize this part. Aside from those changes, this should run exactly like JUC today.
  • CloudBees|Jenkins Technical Track: This is the track in which vendors give technical talks about their services, products, best practices, and what not around Jenkins. The target audience is technical people.
  • Continuous Delivery / DevOps Management Track: this track is also a vendor track, except that the audience is managers and business people.

There's the usual keynotes, sponsor expo, and the social. See the proposed time table.

CD Summit & Jenkins Days 

When there's only one Jenkins World, it leaves out a lot of people who cannot attend that event. So to compliment Jenkins World, this plan creates a smaller event that's easier to produce that goes around the world. Think of this as a miniature version of Jenkins World. We will be carrying the Jenkins message beyond Jenkins World!

CloudBees is partnering with IBM and DevOps.com to conduct a 2 days events in 13 cities in North America and Europe. This roadshow is referred to as "CD Summits  & Jenkins Days". The Jenkins Track will be a combination of CloudBees and Jenkins Community content. A sample of an existing webpage is HERE.  

The 2 days event has the same fixed agenda, primarily from Jenkins World. The same "church and state" separation holds — it will have the JUC portion that's the community part and the CloudBees part, but they will be marked accordingly.

CloudBees will do the heavy-lifting of the event production, but CB'd like to work with local Jenkins Area Meet-up organizers to deliver this event, so that JAMs can leverage the network of people the event builds and vice versa. The event is targeting 200ish people, and aimed at 9 cities in North America and 4 cities in Europe.

 

Jenkins Area Meetup

This effort is already underway somewhat, but we'd like to promote this format where the community mothership maintains a relationship with local meetup organizers.

This is a 2hr evening event that targets 50ish people. It's a technical event, and CloudBees will sponsor those JAM events by donating initial $500 for each JAM.

Caveats

No change is planned at the moment for JUC Israel, which is produced by JFrog and has its own life. The community there appears to be very happy with the current structure, and we don't want to force anything upon them. The same for JUC Tokyo.

Attachments:

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