On 3/8/21 12:18 PM, redbaronbrowser wrote:
As Julien observes, nobody has stepped up to host or administer a conference server. This would seem impractical, for something we do 4-5 times a year. But if you're volunteering, of course I'm very interested in speaking with you more about how this would work.
I'm willing to reach out to 8x8.vc on behalf of the CentOS project to ask about hosting Dojos after the one in May. But before I do that, it would be nice to better understand was criteria the RH OSPO was using. If there is a key feature that makes a closed source service preferable to a FOSS one, I can understand that. If FOSS solutions need to improve first, than I want to help improve them.
However, I am currently working in the dark. There is no transparency into how RH OSPO conducted it's review of services. And I can't find where the feedback on things Hopin was asked to improve is.
*MY* criteria was the following:
1) I had used it already for running Apache events, in my role there as event lead. (Feedback document is here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wxBoEThnLFup57__RmbTBFOgU6L7LxT0Xj-HMP1n... - complete with responses from Hopin folks)
2) RH OSPO offered me use of the platform that they are already paying for.
3) I don't want to have to go hunt for someone to stand up and maintain a service on CentOS infra for something that we do 4-5 times a year.
4) A commercial org has a large incentive to have adequate bandwidth, accessible anywhere in the world, which I could never hope to do on infra that we stand up and host ourselves.
What criteria Red Hat OSPO used to select this service is not really something that it's my place to share with you, even if I had it. My only input into that was that I had had some success using Hopin with Apache events.
There are currently *hundreds* of event hosting platforms/providers, and evaluating them all to select the "best" one is not something I have the time to do. If you wish to take on that project (or get a group together to do it with you) not only would that be awesome for us, but we should share our results with the larger open source ecosystem for everyone's benefit.
Focusing solely on open source solutions is certainly a valid/valuable choice we could make here. As I understand it, at the time that the Red Hat OSPO did the evaluation, there were no reliable hosted open source solution providers that we got positive reviews for. But, again, that's anecdotal and I don't have that info first hand. And since we went with a year-long contract rather than a per-event one, we are in for the long haul.
So ... yes, I would absolutely love to have more help putting together future events, and this is just one of the many places where I could benefit from volunteer effort.
As to this process being transparent ... every time I have worked on putting together one of these events, I have called for volunteers to help with the process, and exactly zero people have ever stepped up to help. So it's hard to be transparent when it's just me working on it. I would love to see that situation change.