Punderings

It always surprises me how little blog attention ApacheCon gets in the weeks up to the conference, and then how loud it is from everyone during the conference liveblogging stuff. In any case, here’s a short selection of the other blog posts about various sessions:

• Hear Carlos talk about Eclipse IAM integration
• Hear Felix talk about OSGi and Maven extensions
• Hear Deepal talk about his Axis 2 training session.
• Hear Ivan talk about mod_security and intrusion detection
• Did you know Erik has a whole site for the Solr Boot Camp?
• You might want to read Sander’s link to a great local story about New Orleans and it’s slow recovery.

Barely more than 2 weeks until we’ll be at Apache Con!

Well, that was an embarrassing copy and paste leftover – fixed now!

Reminder: the early bird prices for ApacheCon US 2008 – for attendees and committers alike – expire at midnight tonight, eastern time. Note that we’ve also reduced (but not eliminated) the actual bump in price for committers to help people get to New Orleans this year.

In any case, you’ll want to make travel plans as soon as practical, especially if you’d like to stay in the conference hotel: the room block rate expires on October 13th. There are often people who are looking to room share as well; ask around if you’re interested in that option.

I’m very happy to announce that we now have 3 confirmed keynote speakers! It looks like a great lineup, and I’m excited to meet them all myself. Just as a teaser:

• A very experienced speaker from a major software company, talking about how to get open source working inside corporate environments.
• A young pioneer in social media technologies like OpenID, talking about how The Apache Way can help in the standards world as well as in the software world.
• A relation to the Apache community, talking about how the software we build can be used in the governmental arena to have a positive impact on people.

Also, if you are speaking or training at ApacheCon, please be sure to blog about your sessions, and publicize them on your project website or in other appropriate communities. We have badges for your website; just ask!

Hey – many thanks to Grant and Erik who both submitted their ApacheCon EU 2009 submissions as soon as the CFP opened. Get yours in quick; it’s a short CFP!

Yes, Louisiana, there’s more to life than just ApacheCon US. The Call for Papers for ApacheCon Europe 2009 will be opening soon – and please note, it will be a short CFP, so get your talk ideas ready now! ACEU09 will return to Amsterdam once again next 23-27 March.

I’ll also mention that:

• ApacheCon US 2008 early bird prices (for everyone) will go up next Friday, October 3rd
• ASF Travel Assistance for attending ApacheCons may be available
• We need more fastfeather-2008-us submissions at apachecon.com – soon!
• If you want to do something at BarCampApache, then sign up on the Attendees page on their wiki!
• If you or your company are interested in sponsoring ApacheCon, you should contact the lovely Delia, of course at apachecon.com – there are always opportunities!
• The print deadline for ads in the program guide is this coming Monday, September 29th

There’s still a few more hours to submit for the next ApacheCon, this November in New Orleans. We’ll have plenty of space, and we’re looking for new ideas, so submit your talks now!

Note: late submissions will still be accepted, although depending on the timing they may be more difficult to schedule.

And now, back to our new channel: ApacheCon Europe is starting! I hear the coffee cups clinking and keyboards tapping as I type…

We have plenty of space in New Orleans this coming November, so we’re extending our CFP through next Monday, 7-April. No, this doesn’t mean you should wait for the last minute (although I know you are, just to make me nervous). But it will give you time to work over the weekend and for us to bang some heads on Monday morning at the Hackathon in ApacheCon Europe, and in the various community Meetups in the area.

For everything ApacheCon, see:
[wiki | socialnetwork | officialsite | streamingvideo | ASFProjects | ASFPeople | ASFPictures | ASFSwag]

For those attending ApacheCon, here are a few updates:

• If you are interested in BOFs at ApacheCon EU, then update the wiki page now! Preliminary schedules will be printed soon. (Updates and changes can happen later, obviously, but it’s best to get publicity out early).
• If you’d like to speak at ApacheCon US, send in your CFP now! We’re following the usual trend of everyone somehow waiting until the last minute to submit. NOTE: The CFP period is MORE THAN HALF OVER. There are a lot of you who haven’t submitted yet, and I’m watching.
• If you’re interested in meeting any of our galaxy of talent, come see our ApacheCon EU Crowdvine site. We’ll be using this as a social networking hub, and I’ve heard that some nifty new CrowdVine features will be coming out, possibly during ApacheCon.
• Speakers at ApacheCon EU should remember to register themselves, and everyone should ensure they have hotel rooms booked, since the Mövenpick Amsterdam is booked up for some nights.

Congratulations to Christian, for being the first to submit an ApacheCon US 2008 CFP – mere hours after they opened – and to Bruce Snyder for posting the 20th CFP submission earlier this week.

To the rest of our past ApacheCon speakers, and everyone new who’d like to speak – get your ApacheCon CFP‘s in, please! We’ll have a lot of space and session tracks available in New Orleans, so we need plenty of content. Now I know that many of you traditionally wait for the last second to send in your CFP’s – why, I’m not quite sure, unless it’s to make me grey before my time. But please – in many cases you already know what you can talk about, and the CFP just needs to be the title and abstract! Please don’t make me bite my nails for the next three weeks waiting for the graph of CFP’s to pick up!

Remember, the CFP closes before ApacheCon Europe at the start of April!

See http://www.us.apachecon.com/us2008/ for all the details.

REMINDER: this is a very short CFP, ending on 3 April – which is the week before ApacheCon Europe, for those of you paying attention. Since we’ll be having our conference planning meeting immediately following ApacheCon Europe, we really can’t extend the date. So be sure to get your talks in on time, please. It really doesn’t take much – just a title and abstract – so there’s no excuse to not doing it before you travel for ACEU!

We have plenty of space in New Orleans, so we’re really looking forward to your CFPs. Both the tried and true talks you may have done before, as well as any new talk ideas you’ve got.

Thanks!

UPDATE: please s/Wednesday to Friday, 5-7 April 2008/Wednesday to Friday, 5-7 November 2008/ in the announcement email, as has been kindly pointed out by Tony. Ooops.