Anatomy of a virtual Spinnaker Summit that doesn’t suck
Ahoy! Who here is ready to set sail on another virtual event adventure?
If my instincts are correct, probably not you. This year has afflicted us with new brands of fatigue, new challenges, and new existential angst. Furthermore, 2020 has boosted the software industry’s significance to the economy, and thus the pressure we face at work.
As we discussed these realities, the Spinnaker Summit SIG (Special Interest Group) rejected the “solution” of shrugging our shoulders and proceeding with an un-inspired virtual version of last year’s 3-day Summit. You surely have plenty of such un-inspiring virtual events to choose from this year. Instead, we asked ourselves,
How can we create a virtual event that will truly matter to our audience?
Our answer:
Make it Generative
Netflix’s Michael Galloway established one guiding goal for this year’s Summit: to provide attendees with hands-on takeaway value.
Since value takes investment to build, Spinnaker Summit will take place over 4 weeks (no typos — a month long!) October 19 - November 12.
Since value looks different to each of us, we’re bucketing experiences into tracks for you to mix & match. Each track will include talks, social opportunities, challenges, and special events. Show up according to your career aspirations or your mood : )
- Technical Leadership: gets interactive by making connections. Sessions will explore SDLC solutions, strategy, opportunities, and challenges with decision-makers interested in the impact of Spinnaker and CI/CD.
- Getting Started: gets interactive by learning new skills. Sessions will educate new Spinnaker operators and users on the world of Spinnaker, and teach them to leverage it to add value.
- Earn Your Stripes: gets interactive by hacking. Sessions will allow operators and contributors to share advanced content on extensibility, integrations, feature development, and experimentation.
For my part, I insist that we provide clear value to the community at Spinnaker Summit. In addition to the hackathon sessions incorporated into the tracks above, we will also offer hands-on governance sessions, including “Meet My SIG” and a “Write the Roadmap” series in which attendees can help to craft Spinnaker’s open source roadmap according to guiding principles from the steering committee. I will also host discussion and swarm sessions on the Contributor Experience, to help us get our new CX SIG off the ground.
Because You Deserve It
Want to give a talk, but not sure what you can talk about?
We’d like to present this conference as a safe space for you, like Spinnaker, to be an imperfect-work-in-progress-that-has-already-accomplished-amazing-things-and-still-works-through-challenges-continuously. Be you! Spinnaker excels at automating software delivery in messy, complicated, work-in-progress scenarios. We’re optimizing for real content that opens the door to honest conversations about where we can take our product and industry together, and what’s standing in the way. Want to blather unscripted for a short while about something you’re passionate about? We’ll seriously consider giving you a platform…that’s called a fireside chat!
This may feel like an inconvenient time to step outside your comfort zone. But where some see chaos, I see opportunity. Opportunity to act. Opportunity to innovate. Opportunity to create the community you want to see in our professional space. To me, right now that’s all about consciously crafting an inclusive space for Spinnaker and discovering what an inclusive tech would look like, so I’m submitting and eliciting content around that.
For you, it might be something different. What can you shine a light on? What do you care about, and how does it intersect with Spinnaker and the SDLC?
All The Myths, Debunked
- This conference is just for Spinnaker content & activities: FALSE! The Summit will feature content curated for the Spinnaker community. As a hub of the SDLC, Spinnaker celebrates the whole toolchain that helps us get software out the door. You are encouraged to submit content about other tools/platforms, or more general content on DevOps, CD, observability, reliability and resilience, security, collaboration, inclusivity, AI…to name a few suggestions.
- If I submit to the CFP I am signing up for creating slides and practicing a public speech: FALSE! The Spinnaker Summit CFP is seeking alternative and interactive sessions along with talks. Got a few great discussion questions you want outside thoughts on? Host a short discussion session! Have a product you think this group would care about? Demo it! Know a great professional skill that you wish more people in our industry had? Teach it!
- I heard about Gardening Days and saw some content from Spinnaker.Live…Spinnaker Summit might be kind of an afterthought at this point: FALSE! With Spinnaker.Live, we aimed to perfect the online Spinnaker event prior to the Summit. We learned that simply multiplying that awesome event by 5 would do our community a disservice. Think of virtual Spinnaker Summit as a slick mash-up of .Live and Spinnaker Gardening Days, the virtual hackathon we launched in April. The Linux Foundation and the Summit SIG are bringing you the best of both events, along with some innovative new ideas, for a unique experience!
- Gardening Days will be part of Spinnaker Summit, and I can expect to hear more details about how to participate in the hackathon soon: TRUE! Hackathon activities a la Spinnaker Gardening Days will be going on ALL MONTH LONG, with contribution options tailored to different experience levels. Look out for more exciting updates, including details about free compute from AWS, a GitHub-sponsored project to hack on, and much more! In the meantime, PR your idea to our Project Ideas list to get the ball rolling.
TL;DR
- You should submit to the Spinnaker Summit CFP before it closes on Friday, September 11th. Think outside the box, lower your expectations (think unconference), and allow your creativity to shine!
- Your talk doesn’t need to be a talk, doesn’t need slides if that’s not your jam (cats playing on a Zoom background is a great alternative), and doesn’t need to be about Spinnaker.
- The next Spinnaker Gardening Days starts 10/19, will be 4 weeks long, and is part of Spinnaker Summit.
- 2020 Spinnaker Summit WILL BE AWESOME I PROMISE
If you have any questions, please email me at rosalind@armory.io or reach out on Spinnaker Slack.
