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What happened to OS Summit Asia?

As some have reported, OS Summit Asia has been postponed. What hasn’t been so clear is why? The simple reason is that not enough people had registered for the conference. Hosting a conference that no one attends, is just not a good way to host a conference.

The reason why no one registered is a bit more complex and difficult to answer. The program and speakers were top-notched. I also thought partnering with Apache was perfect for this type of conference.

So why the lack of interest? A couple of thoughts:

  • We, the people helping to organize the conference, including myself, have little or no experience organizing events in China.  Therefore, we have limited experience on what motivated developers to attend conferences.
  • It didn’t feel like we were taping into the developer community in China. Finding the right forums, magazines, user groups to promote the conference was a challenge.
  • There was some concern about the price of the conference being too high.
  • Some people have mentioned that Hong Kong might not be the best location.

We are going to try again next year. China and greater Asia are important to the Eclipse, and I am sure Apache, communities. If you have any thoughts on organizing a developer event in China, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment. Better yet, if you would like to help organize the event let me know.

Published by Ian Skerrett

Director of Marketing of the Eclipse Foundation

4 thoughts on “What happened to OS Summit Asia?”

  1. Maybe hosting it in a cheaper location like the Philippines could be a good solution. We were interested in attending the event but the price was a little bit of a hurdle.

  2. Apache is fighting to evangelize its opensource ethos but charges closed-source prices for its conference. What kind of audience are you trying to attract anyway – developers working in Fortune 500 companies or opensource developers ?

  3. vainqueur,

    We would like to attract both and I understand that cost is an issue for the open source developers. I believe the conference organizer is going to try to reduce the cost but unfortunately we will need to charge something. These types of events can be very expensive to run and neither the Eclipse or Apache Foundation have the resources to cover the costs.

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