hi
Its been a while since we started the dojo process, and I thought it might be good to recap once how the cfp's have worked in the past - As we reboot this effort, I hope we can get better at this and take what we can and works, and just do things differently as needed.
In the early days, the intention was very much to have a dojo be a local event, primarily targeting a local audience and then focusing on content they are most interested in.
Couple of the main highlights from the dojo's:
1) try and ensure everyone attending has a chance to introduce themselves to the entire audience.
2) ensure we have speakers from the local attendees, people that the audience can already identify with ideally. It encourages these people to become and improve their community participation - and gives the local audience a few people they can rally around ongoing.
3) ensure we have atleast 1 or 2 people talking about CentOS, the project and CentOS the Linux distro / infra / process etc ( ie. not about the code )
4) address the audience with the scope they care for - so rather than doing a Cfp' weve mostly run dojos with invited speakers talking about a pre-selected subject base that would be interesting to the audience. Atleast 1 or 2 of the sessions should be a tutorial like format ( if we have 2 rooms, that makes it easier to have hack sessions as well, or in depth sessions around something specific ).
5) encourage cost of facilities and dojo to come from a sponsor, and make it free of cost to attend. Sponsors are welcome to join the speaker lineup with a topical session
6) Try and setup the room in a way that the dojo can bootstrap a local effort ongoing - so we can help the team come back together, a year down the road, and rerun the dojo without CentOS project participation. ideally, bootstrapping a local community around sysadmin, user-scope, emerging tech in operations and devops etc. Allow the group to retain the CentOS Dojo name for the event, but also ensure they keep it to the spirit and scope of the intended goals.
regards,