Eric Pugh
Category: Uncategorized
I’ve been to every OpenSearchCon in North America and Europe since the second OpenSearchCon took place in Seattle, and this one, the celebrating five years of the OpenSearch Project, in San Jose really clicked for me. I want to get some thoughts down about why, because I think the community hit an inflection point in having real conversations about what this conference series is for.
Who is this conference for?
OpenSearchCon has been working through an identity question since it started five years ago with an, ahem, complex origin story. When we joined the Linux Foundation there was a lot of evangelism work to do. The message was “OpenSearch is not an AWS product, it’s a foundation-governed open source project.” Companies like Uber and SAP got up non stage and talked about how they leveraged the open source nature of it. Yay! a great series of events that told the story of the OpenSearch Software Foundation and how we are bringing new people and organizations into the community.
This though was leading to some mixed signals of who the conference was for… Is it for people building businesses on OpenSearch to attend in order to find new customers? Is it for the community to make decisions together? Is it a chance to do brand building and tell our story to the larger world? As my colleague Daniel Wrigley said: Yes.
The partner roundtable
In previous years the partner roundtable touched on governance, business opportunities, the relationship between AWS and the project, and why the Linux Foundation was selected.
This year however Amanda from NetApp cut right to the identity question. She asked: what big decisions are the maintainers making at this conference? And she followed up with: If the answer is “none,” why would NetApp send developers to the conference?
She is right. The value of this conference is directly proportional to the density of maintainers and prospective maintainers in the room. Total classic example of the network effect. We should be designing our conference to facilitate the network effect.
A Eucatastrophe
I’ve met a senior engineer at two previous OpenSearchCons who has made the long trek from Beijing. We’ve swapped ideas each time, and I’ve always learned from him. This year however he had a specific area of innovation interest, and. I happened to know someone who could help: my colleague Rene, who was also in San Jose, making the long trek from Berlin. I introduced them. They sat down and had exactly the kind of focused, productive conversation about a real OpenSearch problem that doesn’t happen over Slack.
Rene told me afterward it was worth flying from Berlin to San Jose for that one conversation! 🎉
That event was a Eucatastrophe, a term invented by Tolkien: a sudden turn of events in a story that ensures the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending doom.
The Search TAG lunch
Last minute, the conference planning team (thanks Heather!) set up a dedicated room so that we could have a working lunch for folks interested in the Search TAG. A group of us talked through the growing pile of open RFCs (over 200!) related to the Search TAG charter. No panel, no moderator. We just sat down with food and worked out a plan: this group of volunteers will start systematically reviewing RFCs, getting multiple perspectives on each one, and giving authors real feedback.
That happened because a group of people were in the same room. It would not have happened on a mailing list.
The Maintainer Panel
For the very first time ever, we put some maintainers up on stage and discussed what being a maintainer means. Nils, Ramya, Kris and myself shared what it was like being a maintainer on the project, and fielded a spicy question from the audience. Ramya posted about it on LinkedIn https://lnkd.in/p/gdQZD-4g which I think is important, because it’s telling the larger set of folks outside of our exciting bubble that OpenSearch is driven by maintainers, and that is who the conference needs to cater to. It’s also a chance for us to start talking as a specific group at the conference… Maintainer Roundtable similar to the Partner Roundtable?
What I want to see happen at the OpenSearchCon’s in 2027
The planning team is very receptive to feedback, and I’m excited about what could mean in the future.
Here’s my wish list:
- Schedule the TAG meetings as part of the conference agenda. Every Technical Advisory Group should have the opportunity to meet at the conference, and attendees should know about it in advance so they can plan travel accordingly. No one should miss a critical conversation because they booked an afternoon flight on the last day!
- “Ask the Maintainer” sessions. Dashboards, ML-Commons, Agentic Search, the security plugin. Migration Assistent. Data Prepper. Have a maintainer available at a table during a specific time in the conference. Stuck on a PR? Wondering how you can contribute to a specific aspect? Come sit down and have that face to face conversation.
- Travel Assistance Committee. Traveling for conferences can be expensive, and not everyone has the resources for it. Take a page from the ASF’s Travel Assistance Committee to help maintainers cross oceans to meet with the larger community.
- Hackathon! It’s been on my and Charlie’s wishlist for a number of years. Let’s model it on what
- Maintainer Roundtable with the TSC. Let’s give all of the maintainers a chance to interact directly with members of the TSC in a formal setting.
Keep the awesome talks. Keep the keynotes. But add the working sessions and we’ll have something no webinar or Slack thread can replicate: maintainers and members (our future maintainers) making decisions, building relationships, and leaving with commitment to be involved in the project.
Every maintainer should try to make at least one OpenSearchCon a year. Ideally two, to get the cross-continent exchange that keeps the roadmap from becoming a monoculture.
So? Let’s make next year’s OpenSearchCon’s a working conference series. See you there!