[OOTB-hive] The Future of Alfresco Summit

[Ole Hejlskov]

My fellow Bees,

We received a lot of feedback on our hosting a single global Summit in the Americas. Our plan didn't meet the needs of the large portion of our developer community in Europe, and it wasn't likely to meet all our goals for our global network. At the same time, you got excited about organizing a true community-led BeeCon. This conference would meet a lot of the same goals we had for Summit, specifically as a developer and open source conference.
 
After lots of internal discussion, we are changing our strategy:
 
 * We are canceling the planned Alfresco Summit 2015 in New Orleans.

* In order to bring our content to more customers and prospects, we will be increasing our pace of Alfresco Day events. These are free to attend, and held in various cities around the world. We have received lots of positive feedback on these events from those of you who have attended, and we are adding a separate track of developer content at these events. 

* We want to support you with BeeCon. We need to explore with you the ways in which participation from Alfresco corporate makes sense.

* We appreciated your willingness to collaborate with us and not have your conference interfere with our plans for Summit. Canceling Summit hopefully makes it possible for you to have a larger event this fall, instead of a small event this fall and another event next spring.

* We will use the session proposals we received for Summit in order to plan Tech Talk Live webinars, as well as to select presenters for Alfresco Days. If you prepared a proposal, but did not submit it, please send it to community at alfresco.com. We also encourage you to submit to BeeCon when the call for papers opens.
 
We think this course of action is the best way to meet our goals and the goals of our developer and open source communities. We appreciate your collaboration and are interested in your feedback.
 
We are excited about adding developer content to Alfresco Days. This means you will have more opportunities to improve your skills and network with the community, partners and Alfresco staff. We will announce a full plan for the events soon.
 
We apologize to those who have already booked travel. We hope you still get to visit and enjoy New Orleans without being stuck in a conference center. If you make it as far west as Utah, Richard promises to cook you dinner at his house and you can play some soccer with his family ;)

/Ole