On 3/8/21 2:56 PM, redbaronbrowser wrote:
I am not trying to make a negative statement about the job you are doing. Thank you for what you have done for Apache and CentOS events. As well, thank you for working on the newsletters, social media, etc.
No, I didn't take it that way. But I'm also aware that paying someone to do a job is often a very effective way to get volunteers to stand down, and that is absolutely a non-goal of mine.
I also wasn't trying to imply it had to be you to give the RH OSPO criteria. I was hoping they could speak for themselves. Information on what they are and what they do is here:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/what-does-open-source-program-office-do
A key point in that article is this:
"That is the most important mission for an OSPO: aligning open source best practices with the business strategy of the organization."
I think that in this particular case, the balance between open source best practice and business strategy ended up landing on paying for a commercial service rather than trying to host something.
It is *always* the case that when these kinds of debates happen within Red Hat there is a strong "we should only use open source solutions" voice which is then pitted against other more mundane concerns like "do they have the bandwidth for all of our events?" and "are they responsive to bug reports?" I'm sure that was the case here, too.
I would like to help with this important mission someone from the OSPO is willing to accept that help.
Although I wasn't the one that made the Hopin decision for the RH OSPO, I influenced it, and am presumably the spokesperson for RH OSPO here in CentOS.
That said, CentOS is at completely liberty to either use the platform provided for us by RH OSPO, or go our own way. Other RH OSPO-supported projects (Ceph comes to mine) have chosen to use other platforms. I have chosen to take the easy approach of just using the platform that was offered to me, because it was less work for me.
I have run personal virtual events with jitsi in docker. I have also attended virtual events. Having 5-6 presenters is something I have done (which seems to be around were the last Dojo topped out). I personally have not had anywhere near what I expect was the number of attendees to the dojo. That will biggest factor on the amount of upstream bandwidth the server requires.
If you want, I can volunteer to reach out to 8x8 Meet to see if they could offer anything for a future dojo.
I would be glad to hear their offering and how it compares to what RH OSPO is offering us. Financial considerations are, of course important, and if we're going to pay a different service, I am the one that holds the budget on that - but I have a lot of autonomy on spending that for the benefit of the project community.
I would want to know ahead of time how many presenters and attendees you expect to have. I would be asking for a date we could stress test the service ahead of time before committing to using it for a dojo. And I would also be asking to be able to upload the recordings to youtube. Let me know if there is anything else I should be asking for.
For this Dojo - https://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/FOSDEM2021 - we had seven presentations plus the board round-table. That was limited by submissions, rather than by any artificial limit that I imposed upon it. I would be glad to have more presentations in our schedule. For the last in-person event we had 12 presentations - https://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Brussels2020
We had right around 200 attendees. https://blog.centos.org/2021/02/centos-dojo-fosdem-2021/ And, again, I would be happy for it to be bigger than that.
If we had a volunteer (or group of volunteers) who wanted to run our Dojos, the only "control" I have over that is budgetary. (Unless someone else either wanted to pay for it, or find sponsors to cover it, as we have done at various times in the past.)
--Rich