Xen Summit 2009 Proposal

I am currently working on the Xen.org Community Plans for 2009 Xen Summits and I wanted to share my thoughts with the community to get feedback on my ideas. In the past, Xen Summits have been held every 9 months with the majority of them being in North America. It is my intention, as you can see with the upcoming Xen Summit Tokyo/Asia in November, to ensure that we provide an opportunity for all community members to attend a Xen Summit without having to travel a great distance. To support this concept, I am proposing the following plan for 2009:

• Xen Summit North America

• Location: Oracle is scheduled to host this event on February 24 – 25, 2009 in Redwood Shores, CA at Oracle’s Conference Center
• Focus:  The Xen.org development community with an agenda highlighting the latest features being developed, status updates on research projects leveraging Xen, and customer demonstrations of Xen solutions
• Length: 2 Days

•  Xen Summit Europe

• Location: I am speaking to the LinuxTAG and Linux Kongress organizations about co-locating with one of their events in Germany
• Focus: Research and customer demonstrations of how they are using Xen; As this event is co-located with a Linux event this is a good opportunity to promote the Xen solution to a wider audience so the agenda needs to be more “how to use Xen”.
• Length: 1 Day

•  Xen Summit Asia

• Location: OPEN (Xen Summit Tokyo/Asia 2008 is being hosted by Fujitsu in Tokyo)
• Focus: Specific developer topics related to areas critical in Asia (e.g. IA64), how Xen is being used in Asia and new research occurring in Asia [Cross b/w Xen Summit North America and Xen Summit Europe for overall agenda focus]
• Length: 2 Days

• Xen Summit North America II

• Location: If we follow previous schedules, this event will be held nine months after Xen Summit North America; therefore this would be in the Fall 09
• Focus: Same as Xen Summit North America
• Length: 2 Days

Note, I have tried to create different focuses for the events to ensure that community members are not required to attend all the events to stay in touch with the community. The Xen Summit North America event will be the developer focused meeting while the other Xen Summits will take a more customer/researcher focus.
As for the future, I have received requests to hold a Xen Summit in India and possibly South America. As the community grows, I expect to see us offer more events globally to better serve the global community and we will revisit the plan when scheduling for 2010.
Community Questions for Discussion

1. Do we want to host 2 Xen Summits North America next year to continue the 9 month separation of events?
2.  Is there demand for a 1 day Xen Summit event in Germany? Is there another location in Europe that would be better? Is there another event to consider for co-location?