Jenkins User Conference

CloudBees Motivation:

At CloudBees, Jenkins is everywhere - from people to our products. For example, Kohsuke is in the virtual office next to me, I talk with Ryan (Jenkins as a Service guy), Stephen (weather icons guy) and Paul (Jenkins on private clouds guy) daily; we have built Nectar (our supported version of Jenkins) and DEV@cloud which takes Jenkins into the cloud. We actively contribute source code and encourage Kohsuke to continue in his endeavor of making Jenkins even better.

Internally, we have talked about doing something more than supporting Kohsuke and contributing code - contributing directly to the Jenkins community. Over the past few months, this taken the shape of trying to do a"Jenkins User Conference " - giving the community an opportunity to congregate, present the latest thinking and share some beers.

Details:

We approached the governance board early this week with a proposal to do the conference. The governance board has given us their approval. We would like active engagement from the community. CloudBees will be sponsoring a part of the conference (and we will actively look for others) - any surpluses from the conference will be given back to the community for future events (or infrastructure!). CloudBees has dedicated a few folks to help make the logistics of the conference happen.

Where & When: San Francisco, Oct 2nd 2011.

The idea is to do this on the Sunday before JavaOne (October 2nd).

Why JavaOne? Given that a number of Java developers and Jenkins users will be flying into San Francisco - it just seemed natural to do it at this time.

What's Next?

• Given the extremely tight deadlines (8 weeks) to set this up. We have setup an Organization Committee made up of couple of members from the Jenkins governance board and from CloudBees. Alias is juc-oc-ext @ cloudbees . com.

• We invite other community members who want to actively contribute to join the Organization Committee.

• One of the first things that we want the OC to do quickly is determine the agenda and format. (My follow up blog will indicate a proposed agenda)

• We will be opening for sponsors soon - we are currently working on sponsorship details. Please let me know if you or your organization would be interested in helping to sponsor this event. We would like the event to be free to attendees.

• We are immediately opening for a Call for Papers. Talks will likely be 30 minutes in length. We are considering doing a lightening talk session for plugin developers with talks that are 10 minutes in length as well. Email alias for submission: juc-cfp @ cloudbees.com

• Naming the conference? Suggestions are welcomed! I propose JUC (pronounced juice) :-)

Last words:

I was the Product Manager for Hudson at Sun Microsystems and pushed to offer Hudson as a product while at Sun. I now handle DEV@cloud and Nectar. I have always felt that I needed to directly contribute to the community and I am very excited to see this taking shape. The Jenkins product and the community ROCK (Kohsuke you do too ;-)).

Please shoot me an email - if you want to contribute or have questions and concerns.

• Harpreet Singh, Senior Director of Product Management
  (hsingh @ cloudbees . com)