By now, you are surely aware of the Jenkins User Conference (JUC) that will be held the Sunday before JavaOne – October 2 – at the Marines’ Memorial Hotel in San Francisco, starting 9:00am PDT. This is a major milestone for the Jenkins Community – our first ever User Conference!
The Jenkins community needs to participate in JUC – certainly as an attendee, but also in supporting the organization and promotion of the Conference. Several vendors are helping to organize this first conference, but I think it’d be good for everyone if this is a community-driven event, and for that the Jenkins Community must play a major role, too.
To that end, I’d like to ask everyone to do the following to support JUC:
- Register to attend. After all, it’s a free event with lots of useful contents!
- Speak. People often incorrectly think that they need to be a project insider to be “qualified”, but that’s not the case. Lots of users want to hear about how other fellow users are using the software. So please tell us your showing off how you use Jenkins, clever ways you combine various pieces, technical/organizational challenges you faced, an so on. There are some great suggestions for potential topics on the JUC web page.
- Recruit. If you aren’t comfortable speaking, please recruit someone else you think has an interesting Jenkins-related topic to present to the Community.
- Promote the Conference. Even if you can’t come, please Tweet about it, re-Tweet posts you see from the @jenkinsconf Twitter account to your followers, email your friends, post to Facebook, and Like the JUC posts already there. If you paste in the JUC web page URL to your Facebook post, it will automatically pull in the cool Jenkins image we created for the conference. All of these things are easy to do and they really make a difference in getting the word out!
- Sponsor the Conference. Sponsors are actively being recruited. One of the ways companies can give back to the Jenkins project that they’ve benefited from is by sponsoring JUC. Helping the project flourish protects your company’s investment in the use of Jenkins. All sponsorship levels also defray the costs of the Conference, thus keeping it free for attendees. Maybe your company would consider sponsoring? Hit up your favorite vendor to do so, too!
Registrations are coming in daily. So far, we have about 80 attendees, so please keep them coming. If you haven’t registered, register soon before the seats fill up. Making the event successful opens up many interesting options (like organizing other events in the future, etc), and that way it benefits the community as a whole, not to mention continuing to increase the Community’s knowledge and making Jenkins an even better platform in the process.
I look forward to seeing you there – as an attendee, a speaker, and/or a sponsor! We’ll have some more exciting things to announce in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!