VUG4 report / Future of VUG ?

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

The fourth Varnish User Group meeting is over, and as usual I want
to share my thoughts about it with our users.

This was the first VUG on the American Continent and also the first
where we did not have everybody sitting around a table, so it was
a different VUG4 than it used to be.

It was also the largest so far, peaking sometimes at 40-50 persons.

But the SURGE/2011 conference association clearly skewed the audience,
in the sense that there were "just peeking in" attendees, something
we have not previously seen, so the number of filled chairs is not
directly comparable to previous VUGs.

We tried hard to avoid the developers hi-jacking the forum with
stuff they could easily discuss elsewhere, without boring everybody
else.  Not quite sure we succeeded entirely, but we did try.

But there is no escaping that this "User Group" is still very much
being pushed by the Varnish developers, and to be honest, I had
hoped and expected to see more user involvement by now.

It could well be that there isn't much users have to say to each
other about Varnish, or it may be that Varnish does not give people
enough heartburn to make travel to VUG's seem like a good investment
of their time.

If that is the case, I'm perfectly happy to continue the current
VUG meeting model as a forum for developer-user interaction and
for those users who needs some developer face-time.

But if people don't go to VUG's because they are not what users
want, and not what users need, then we should drop the VUG concept,
and instead focus on what users want and need.

But that sort of depends on you, the users, telling us why you did
_not_ go to the VUG4, and what we could have done to make you attend.

Please drop me a private email on the subject...

Poul-Henning


PS: In case you havn't noticed, we have a new Varnish Developer,
Andreas "scoof" Plesner Jacobsen, who wants to make our documentation
much better and who has already improved it a lot.

Much appreciated Andreas!

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.