Get a free burst of ideas at the Meetups

Short, powerful presentations are the order of the day at the free Meetups that will run during the evenings of Monday 23 March and Tuesday 24 March.

These informal gatherings are based around talks – some as short as 5 minutes, none longer than 30 minutes – where everybody can share discoveries, projects, best practice, and case studies. One rule: no advertising.

The Meetups have already been proven internationally, but this is the first time that they’re taking place alongside ApacheCon, hosted in the same venue. The committers will already be in town, and others will be able to socialise after the training sessions taking place in the day.

The conversations may move down to the hotel bar, and it will be a chance to mingle with others who share your interests. And you don’t have to be a committer or developer to benefit, either. In the past, the majority of visitors have been software users, or in many cases potential users. We’ve even seen companies formed as a result of the networking that takes place at these Meetups.

This year, we already have five Meetups planned:

• Wicket Meetup
• Jackrabbit Meetup
• Portals Meetup
• Lucene Meetup
• Maven Meetup

To attend any of those, you can just turn up on the day, but we’d really appreciate it if you registered your interest in advance. If nothing else, it means we can make sure the room is big enough!

Meetups are organised by the software communities themselves, and are not officially part of the ApacheCon programme. We’d love it if you wanted to add another Meetup – we’ve got room for one more this year! Just email arje@apache.org if you’d like to propose the topic. If you don’t want to organise a Meetup this year, let us know if you’d like to plan ahead for the next ApacheCon, too.

We look forward to meeting you!

For more information, and to register your interest, visit the ApacheCon Meetups Wiki.

Video saved the conference star

ApacheCon offers a fantastic opportunity to meet up with your peers and gather new ideas. Many attendees tell us that the time they spend outside the official sessions – networking, sharing ideas and learning from others – is as valuable as the structured conference time. But if you can’t make it, we can help to ensure you don’t miss out on some of the star presentations.

We’ll be streaming keynotes and lunch presentations for free, so that everybody can share in these agenda-setting talks.

You can also access video streams of one selected track each day, for a fee:

• Wednesday: Geeks for Geeks (Hadoop)
• Thursday: Tomcat for Developers and Administrators
• Friday: HTTP Server Administration

If you can’t be in Amsterdam because you have a diary clash, don’t worry: buying a streaming video pass grants you access to the recorded conference sessions after the event.

The fee for participating in the live streaming is US$119 for residents outside the EU, and EUR 99 (including 19% VAT) for residents of the EU. You can see the program for the streamed tracks and sign up to watch here.

And if that program makes you wish you were here, it’s still not too late to join us in person! Register for ApacheCon now to make sure you don’t miss out on one of the most important software industry dates in 2009’s calendar.