# ApacheCon North America 2022 Report

ApacheCon North America 2022 was held in New Orleans, USA, October 3-6 2022. We had 450 registrations, of which 345 actually checked in on site.

Attendee sentiment seemed to be overwhelmingly positive. However, a more formal attendee survey is pending, and will provide more scientific evaluation of this.

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High-level financial statement goes here.
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The event was made possible by our sponsors:

* Platinum sponsors: AWS, Cloudera, Google Cloud, and Gradle
* Gold sponsors: DataStax, Instaclustr, Red Hat, Salesforce, and Sonatype
* Silver sponsors: Apple and OpenSearch
* Bronze sponsors: Aiven, Datagrate, Bloomberg, and DBeaver

Special thanks also go to the track chairs (listed below), to our event photographer Kris Traquair, to the Travel Assistance Committee (TAC) staff and recipients, and especially to Ruth Suehle and Brian Proffitt, who did the bulk of the work to make this event happen.

TAC recipients were on-hand to staff the registration desk and MC individual sessions, througout the week, and were generally available on demand when urgent needs arose. Many thanks to them, and to Gavin for coordinating that effort.

(Note: TAC reports separately - look there for more detail on TAC recipients)

In addition to the per-track reports below, we also had Birds of a Feather sessions most evenings, which were reportedly well attended.

Keynote presentations were pretty much all standing room only, with great presentations from David Nalley, Kerry Donny-Clark (Google Cloud), William Hurley (StrangeWorks), Paul Vixie (AWS), Demetris Chetham (GitHub), Sudhir Meno (Cloudera), and Hans Dockter (Gradle).

The Lightning Talks (MCed by Ruth Suehle and Brian Proffitt), and the attendee reception on Wednesday evening, were also well-attended.

On the whole, I am very pleased with the event, on all metrics.

Discussion of next year's event will commence on the Planners mailing list in the coming months. We have several offers from third parties to assist in production, and are weighing those.

## IoT: Chris Dutz

The IoT Track sort of worked well … we only had one dropout due to a covid infection of one speaker.

From an attendance perspective the Kafka IoT Track from Kai was definitely the best visited one (full house) and I guess my PLC4X one was the least attended one (6-7 people). Unfortunately, I don’t have exact numbers.

## Search: Anshum Gupta

Our only cancellation was a week before the conference. We had a speaker cancel due to health reasons.

All other talks in the Search track were very well received. The first talk of the day was the only one that wasn’t a full house but still had around 15 people. I believe that was because Mike McCandless’s Lucene benchmark talk from the Performance track clashed with this one. All other talks had standing room only and I had to start using the speakers’ chair for attendees at one point. A few people had to leave Mike Sokolov’s talk when there was no standing room so perhaps we could’ve done with a larger room for the track, which I’ll remember for next time.

There were a few PMC members from Apache Lucene and Solr at all of the talks. Most of them were able to connect with existing as well as potential contributors and learn about their challenges and how we could be of help to them.

I spoke to a few speakers and attendees from the track and everyone said that they enjoyed the content and the quality of the talks.

## Libraries, Frameworks, Developer Tools: Matt Sicker

I worked on the Libraries, Frameworks, and Developer Tools track which took place on Monday and Tuesday. We had only one talk cancelled (the one about OpenNLP 2.0), and the rest were all held as planned. Most of the talks were fairly well attended, and a couple were standing room only (if I recall correctly, the Ozone talk was quite well attended). Some of the talks in this track were related to other standalone tracks (e.g., Camel, Groovy), so that likely helped with some of the interest, but all talks in the track were at a level that was understandable whether or not you were already using the presented projects (e.g., you didn’t have to be a big data nerd to understand the Ozone or Zookeeper talks).

Overall, I think it went really well! While I reviewed the talks blindly (i.e., without knowing who submitted it unless they included that in the abstract for some reason which was a fairly disqualifying factor), the result was a diverse range of speakers from all sorts of unrelated projects and communities, so I think that such a track could continue to attract further participation in the future (or at least something similar; if given multiple days in the future, I could split it up into something like maintainer-relevant talks and user-relevant talks or something along those lines).

## FinTech: Javier Borkenztain

The Fintech track had some changes at the last minute due to the difficulty of obtaining Visas from our speakers. Still, we managed to accommodate it from our backup list, and all the scheduled talks were delivered as expected.

The audience for the talks was good, considering the topic's novelty at ApacheCon, and that Fineract is a business applications and not tools or frameworks for developers. But I expected more audience on the talks. The most attended talk was about 30 people.

We had great conversations regarding the direction and actions of the Fineract community.

## Data Engineering: Jarek Potiuk

The Data Engineering Track seemed pretty uneventful compared to others, but possibly that's a good thing :).

I think most of the talks were really good and focused and gave the attendees a lot to talk/think about. There were also a few unexpected highlights ("morel" language talk was one that I personally kept on having multiple conversations about after the talk and the inspirational part of it was amazing). I think the idea of adding "data engineering" independent of "big data" was a fantastic idea and we both with Ismael look forward to making it even better next year.

The audience was good - we mostly had almost-full-house.

## Groovy: Paul King

The Groovy Track organizers, the Groovy PMC, and the Groovy community overall want to extend our thanks to you, Ruth, Brian, the TAC folks, and the rest of the team involved with the conference.

We had a few speakers who pulled out early on but we had replacement talks, so weren't impacted too badly. We had a couple of talks with only 7-9 attendees, several that were standing room only and the rest were in between. We had one afternoon devoted to some workshop-style content. We fitted this content into the existing time slots. The content seemed to be well-received and I think we would like to explore more workshops, perhaps with longer time-slots, for future conferences.

## Cloud-native track: Rajith Attapattu

For this track and in general, there was a lot of interest in practitioner reports or talks involving the use of several apache projects in building a solution. For these types of talks the audience had plenty of questions and often tried connecting with speakers afterwards.

Although we only had a day and a half worth of topics for this track(the last minute dropouts didn't help) I felt the topics generated plenty of interest.

Shout out to the volunteers who were there to lend a helping hand.

## Geospatial: George Percivall and Jim Hughes

The Geospatial Track included five presentations and a capstone discussion. Attendance in the track varied from standing room only for the Geospatial Search with Apache Lucene presentation; to a handful of people for the presentation on a new effort to define geospatial extensions to Parquet. The capstone discussion session was a good mix of people representing projects using geo to the people addressing geo across projects. A particular call to action came from Julian Hyde, Apache Calcite, to increase the amount of discussions on [e-mail] between ApacheCons. This was the seventh Apache conference with a geospatial track; The first geo track was at Apache Big Data, 2016. It is recommended to have a geospatial track in ApacheCon next year.

## Pulsar: Dave Fisher

Reports are that we had 15-20 people in attendance for each talk.

## Community: Sharan Foga

The Community Track ran over 2 and a half days. We had a few cancellations and things - some visa related but I was really happy with what we finally ended up with. I did start tracking the session numbers but lost the sheet! Mick's opening talk was a full house with sitting / standing room. Unfortunately I missed most of the first day due to an urgent dental appointment but I heard that we pretty much kept the room at least half to full all the way through. From the second day onwards I was in all the sessions and think the lowest was something like 14 people. The few numbers I do have are - Jim's Apache Way talk had 32, and How do put on a distributed event had 18, as did the talk on issue management and bug tirage.

I think we had a great range of topics that were cross project so it was great to hear about what Cassandra, Lucene, Airflow and PLC4X and others had done around community - especially the lessons learned. I would say the format was more story telling about real situations, real problems and real solutions - which seemed to strike a chord with the audience.

## ASF booth: Sharan Foga

On the booth - I think we had the largest queue of any of any of the booths on the first couple of days as people came along to check out the latest swag. The items seemed popular and it pretty much all went. Some of the projects were pleasantly surprised to see their project stickers. (Minor hiccup with Lucence having the old logo but have resolved that). We also had some good conversations and many people came back to just simply have a chat. Special thanks goes out to the TAC team for helping out and smiling all the way.

## Tomcat - Christopher Shultz

Huge thanks to Rich, Ruth, and Brian for their work making this conference a success. Also to Sharan for wrangling the ASF booth and probably getting sore from handing out all that swag. (The one-shoulder backpacks are amazing. I will bring that to every conference I ever go to from now on.)

All talks in the Tomcat track (1 full day) went well except for one with some video problems which we believe were presenter-hardware-related and we got corrected for a later presentation. I had all veteran presenters, so there were no schedule issues or surprises.

It's too bad we don't have any official recordings of the talks (for all rooms). I understand we (a) didn't have a sponsor and (b) didn't have any volunteers to do that work, which is why it wasn't really possible. I think Sharan recorded the Community talks herself, and I recorded the Tomcat ones on audio. One of our presenters (remm) recorded video and I'll be trying to get lavalier-mic-audio-plus-video mixed together for a publicly-releasable video. Now if I can just figure out how to get the audio off the sd card...

With the notable exception of "Proxying to Tomcat with httpd", the Tomcat track was essentially a bust. Usually somewhere between 2 - 10 attendees per talk in one of the huge rooms (Rhythms II). jfclere's presentation had probably 35 attendees, which is about average for presentations we have had in the past.

That said, the attendees who did attend were quite interested in the content, asked good questions, and seemed engaged.

The Tomcat PMC is discussing what kind of presence we should have at upcoming events. Switching from US to Europe may change the "market" for our talks, but none of the talks we did in the track were truly new (other than "New and Improved [for Tomcat]" which is sort of a rolling-updates presentation we try to give when we have a track). They were also given by committers (and PMC members) and nothing from the community like "I use Tomcat to do X". So I think we will have to try harder next time to get (a) fresh material and (b) new presenters.

We had very high attendance for the @home events, so there is definitely an audience for what we are presenting. This is one of the reasons we feel like it's a shame that (official) recording wasn't an option this year: we would expect that our "audience" is really folks who could not or would not travel this year.