… and the winner is … Europe/London!

Despite the future Brexit plans, London will still be this year the beating heart of Code Review innovation by hosting the Gerrit User Summit 2017.

Here are the numbers in detail:

• 157 people visited the poll page (goo.gl/M7X6rp)
• 75 people from 14 countries expressed their vote in the past two weeks
• Summit in Europe (only Europe + USA/Europe) received 54 votes
• Summit in USA (only USA + USA/Europe) received 37 votes

Countries

The audience is very diverse, with the most votes coming from West and East Coast of the USA, the British Isles, and Germany. There was some interest in the Summit as well from Israel, India, and Japan.

It will be excellent to see new faces at this year Gerrit User Summit, to exchange ideas and capture new and essential requirements for the next versions to come.

The London Venue and Dates

SkillsMatter offered the CodeNode venue in London (10 South Place, London, EC2M 7EB, GB) which is entirely dedicated to hosting events, meetups and user groups from the global OpenSource Community.

The new venue can record every session, open policy about taking pictures and share content and the possibility of streaming the event to allow remote attendees to watch and interact.

The proposed dates for the event are:

• Saturday 30/09 to Sunday 01/10 – Pre-summit and Gerrit+Plugins Hackathon
• Monday 02/10 to Tuesday 03/10 – Gerrit User Summit

New location, same community, and format

Even though this year the country and location will be different from the past User Summits hosted by Google in Mountain View – CA, we want to keep the organization and format of the Summit exactly as it was before:

• User-driven: focussed on sharing experiences and networking between the users of Gerrit Code Review
• Self-organized by the Community: no calls for papers, sponsored talks or products presentations. All has to come from the users and voted by the users.
• No commercials: even though the supporters of the event are business entities (SkillsMatter, eSynergy, GerritForge and many others) we will be very careful in keeping the spotlight on the users and not interfere with them.

Costs and sponsorships

Historically Google has paid for all the costs involved in the Summits (venue, catering, marketing, etc.). For this year, a lot of companies who are using Gerrit Code Review and contributing to it have already provided their interest in contributing to cover the costs and make this European event successful.

We want to keep the list of sponsors small and tightly coupled with the Gerrit Community. If you are a company and you want to sponsor the event, please contact Luca Milanesio (luca@gerritforge.com) or post your offer to the Gerrit Code Review mailing list https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/repo-discuss.

Next steps

We will work together with the Gerrit Community to organize this event and make it fruitful and profitable for the future of this amazing OpenSource project.

Thanks again for your vote and your interest in the 2017 Summit.

Luca Milanesio – GerritForge