Alfresco cancels Summit, asks community to organize its own conference

summit-community-editionEarlier this week, in a post to a public mailing list, Ole Hejlskov, Developer Evangelist at Alfresco, announced that the company will not be putting on its annual conference, Alfresco Summit, this year as originally planned. Instead, the company is focusing on smaller, shorter, sales-oriented events which have been very successful in several cities around the globe.

Ole said that Alfresco will be adding developer content to its Alfresco Day events, which have historically been mostly end-user and decision-maker focused. In contrast, Alfresco’s yearly events started out as developer-focused conferences, but in recent years had a more balanced agenda with both technical and non-technical tracks.

Alfresco had announced earlier in the year that their annual conference would be in New Orleans in November. In each of the last five years the company put on two conferences–one in Europe and the other in United States. For 2015 the plan was to have a single conference only in the U.S. which drew criticism from the community that skews heavily toward a non-U.S. demographic.

When the community realized Alfresco Summit 2015 would be held only in the U.S., an independent community organization called The Order of the Bee began making plans to hold their own conference in Europe. Alfresco says it will support the community’s efforts to hold its own event and wants to explore “…ways in which participation from Alfresco corporate makes sense”.

I understand where Alfresco is coming from. Annual conferences are expensive in both real dollars and the time and attention it takes to plan and execute. When you multiply that times two it obviously represents an even bigger investment.

You also have to look at what Alfresco gets out of the conference. Alfresco is increasingly sales-focused. The conference has historically been focused on knowledge-sharing and camaraderie. Yes, there were deals closed at Alfresco Summit but it was not geared towards selling. It was more about coming together to share stories, good and bad.

The Alfresco Day events are unabashedly sales and marketing. The attendees (and they get very large turnouts) know this which means Alfresco does not have to apologize for coming off too sales-y. Multiple cities with hundreds of prospects is a better investment for them than two cities with 1400 attendees who are existing customers and community members.

As the guy who led DevCon and Alfresco Summit and together with my team grew it year after year, it is weird to see Alfresco cancel the conference for 2015. I was looking forward to attending.

As a member of The Order of the Bee, I’m intrigued by the challenge of using an all-volunteer organization to potentially put together a replacement conference of some sort. If you have any interest in helping and you did not see my email to the mailing list, we’ll probably be meeting next week to get organized. Reach out to me and I’ll add you to the invitation.

25 comments

  1. Eddie says:

    I recently attended the Jooma! & Beyond #jab15 conference in Prague. Organised & attended by volunteers, it was a joyful (yes, joyful!) coming together of project volunteers, developers and end users. We had fun but also spent time getting things done on the project. I’d recommend checking out the keynotes & some of the sessions, and maybe touching base with the organisers – they have a good track record.

  2. Jeff Potts says:

    tlaureys,
    I suspect leaving it up may be an oversight. From Ole’s post: “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.”
    The Order of the Bee has been using “BeeCon” to refer to the community-organized conference.

  3. Gabriele Columbro says:

    [Disclaimer: I work for Alfresco Inc and am the Product Manager for the Developer Platform]

    Hey Jeff,

    thanks for the recap.

    As the owner of the Developer ecosystem for Alfresco, with Ole in my team, I can tell you I want to leverage this change of direction to have better focused events with a clear audience and objectives (either Dev or Sales / Marketing, even in the same events but with clearly separated tracks).

    I do think that, if we act smartly and in alignment between Alfresco Inc and the Order, it can help greatly to create events which match real “personas” expectations, instead of trying to make a one-size-fits-all event, which seemed (from comments I often read in IRC or Mailing List) to make everyone “sub-optimally” happy (or just flat out complaining).

    I can promise my and Ole commitment, as I have a personal stake on it, to foster the Developer persona needs, and hopefully we can find the best mix between Alfresco Conferences, BeeCon and Alfresco Days to cover the very wide audience Alfresco wants to cater for.

    One note only: we are not asking the Community to organize its own conference.

    It’s more, in the spirit of collaboration and openness that still moves my team, like: we heard you are organizing the BeeCon and likely we can help making this a success and complement it with additional investments where it makes sense (for both).

  4. Jeff Potts says:

    Gab,

    I think you are correct that this approach may be the best way to connect content and people with all of the right constituents. Ole also replied to the list with your note saying that you feel like you are not asking the Community to organize its own conference. As I replied to Ole, if the annual conferences were continuing in each geography the idea of a BeeCon would not have been born. It is the decision to stop those conferences that causes the Community to have to step in and do something.

    I’m glad you and your team are on board with helping make a community-driven conference successful. We can’t do it without you!

    Jeff

  5. Richard Esplin says:

    The content of the post is accurate, but I agree with Gab and Ole that the title is a bit misleading. The current title sounds like Alfresco is being heavy handed, when we are actually trying to be collaborative.

    I think a better title would be “Alfresco cancels Summit, collaborates with community organized conference”.

    Your explain your choice of title by saying that a single global Summit created a vacuum in EMEA that the Order of the Bee is trying to fill. I see that as an unrelated issue, as our shift in priorities would have led us to cancel Summit regardless of the location.

    The Order of the Bee conference was proposed before we decided to cancel Summit, and we think it makes more sense to work that into our revised strategy rather than create an independent strategy. We aren’t insisting that the open source community fill a gap, as our leadership feels that smaller regional events meet the essential needs for this year. As a company, our main goal in participating in BeeCon is to support the efforts of the community contributors.

    This is intended to emphasize that the Alfresco team wants to collaborate and is trying to figure out the best way to do that without being dictatorial.

    It is also interesting to note that our proposing a single event in the US sparked an outpouring of enthusiasm which might prove over the long term to be an accidental touchstone in our community’s maturation. I hope we look back on this as being a time when OOTBee became a much more visible presence in the Alfresco developer ecosystem.

    Thanks for being fair-minded in your analysis of Alfresco topics.

  6. Jeff Potts says:

    Sorry Richard, but this title was too long: “Alfresco cancels summit, tells community that if a summit in any geography is important to you then you’ll have to do it yourself and we’ll be glad to help”.

    Anyway, time to move forward and see if the community can rally behind this.

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