Re: Why no Academic discounts taken up at ApacheCon? Come and help us address this at Barcamp Re: ACUS registration report [20091021]

2009/10/22 Jeffery Painter <[email protected]>:
>
> Well, the conference is during a week while most of us are in class. That
> may be one of the major factors influencing the lack of academic
> registrations.

That counts for students and some lecturers, I agree. I wouldn't
expect students to
attend at cost anyway. I'm hoping we will get students/lecturers to BarCamp and
MeetUps.

However, there are a great many staff in universities who do not have
anything to do with teaching - like me for example.

Ross

>
> --
> Jeffery Painter
>
>
>> There has, to date, not been a single use of the academic discount
>> code for ApacheCon. If you care about this then come to our BarCamp
>> session on community outreach at ApacheCon -
>> http://barcamp.org/BarCampApache
>>
>> On the one hand the lack of academic registrations surprises me -
>> there are many unis in the area and they claim to understand the
>> importance of open source - they certainly use it a great deal. On the
>> other hand it doesn't surprise me for the following reasons:
>>
>> a) it is massively expensive for academics (lets hope we get some
>> academic folk to the freebies, but don't hold your breath)
>>
>> b) the academic sector does not understand open source - to the extent
>> that major projects are usually funded under a hybrid model they call
>> "community source"  [1] and [2]
>>
>> c) there is almost no content of interest to the the average academic
>> developer - they use Apache software but because of (b) they don't
>> realise they can participate.
>>
>> Point a) is a difficult one to deal with in isolation since we want
>> the prices to come down for everyone and the event has to be paid for
>> somehow.
>>
>> Point b) requires a significant amount of outreach from the ASF. There
>> is a huge amount of FUD in the sector, most of it born of a lack of
>> understanding rather than malice (although a big-corp director
>> recently accused my team of being biased towards the GPL in my
>> ***non-advocacy*** day job advisory role. Quite amusing since my team,
>> understandably, tell me I'm biased towards permissive licences and
>> that is showing in our work).
>>
>> For point c) what we need is activities focussed on awareness of the
>> way we do things. If we want people to understand how things work
>> around here, we simply cannot expect people to read through our dodgy
>> documentation and then jump into a mailing list full of confidence.
>> Apache is a very scary place for newcomers, people on this list will
>> not recognise that - we're already here and we've got over that
>> hurdle.
>>
>> Take a look at an independent report from one of my recent day job
>> events in this context - it happened that 2/3 projects speakers
>> represented ASF projects but it was not an ASF event [2]. I intend to
>> be doing a session on this at the BarCamp, so please come along and
>> help figure out what we can do and, more importantly, what you can do
>> to help.
>>
>> I feel pretty sure that some people will say "we don't need to do
>> outreach" - that's fine, some of us think we do need to, so rather
>> than standing in our way in this thread I politely request that you
>> step aside and let us get on with it - it's not going to *hurt* your
>> project (if I'm wrong in this then of course I would like to hear
>> those thoughts).
>>
>> So see you at the BarCamp...
>>
>> Ross
>>
>> [1] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/communityvsopen.xml
>> [2] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/communitysource.xml
>> [3]
>> http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2009/10/17/event-report-oss-watch-workshop-engaging-developers-with-open-source-projects/
>> --
>> Ross Gardler
>>
>> OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research
>> http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk
>>
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-- 
Ross Gardler

OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk