Shane is founder of Punderthings℠ LLC consultancy, helping organizations find better ways to engage with the critical open source projects that power modern technology and business. He blogs and tweets about open source governance and trademark issues, and has spoken at major technology conferences like ApacheCon, OSCON, All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, and Ignite.
Shane Curcuru serves as VP Brand Management for the ASF, wrote the trademark and branding policies that cover all 200+ Apache® projects, and assists projects with defining and policing their trademarks, as well as negotiating agreements with various software vendors using Apache software brands. Shane is serving a seventh term as an elected Director of the ASF, providing governance oversight, community mentoring, and fiscal review for all Apache projects.
Otherwise, Shane is: a father and husband, a BMW driver and punny guy. Oh, and we have cats! Follow @ShaneCurcuru and read about open source communities and see my FOSS Foundation directory.
Authored Comments
HOW TO PITCH YOUR PRODUCT AT A CONFERENCE WITHOUT SELLING YOUR SOUL (OR ANNOYING ALL YOUR ATTENDEES)
A rebuttal essay on Medium:
https://medium.com/@shanecurcuru/how-to-pitch-your-product-at-a-confere…
Amen to all your reasons, and your plea for not trying to shoehorn a product pitch into technical conferences. I may have been at one of the conferences you're talking about where there were two blatantly commercial keynotes back-to-back. I felt bad for one of the speakers, who perhaps realized they were marketing too hard, but who gamely tried to keep reading through the script.
For all the potential sales your "pitch" might draw to your booth, trust us - the reputation loss in the larger technical community in open source conferences is not worth it. FOSS folks know who brings technical information versus who's just plain selling.
Well, in college we used FORTRAN as a giant calculator for engineering, but that doesn't really count.
First real programming language was Lotus 1-2-3 macros, a cryptic but powerful language that allows rewriting the macro code itself. My original resume listed "building /DQE test automation harness that covered 20 sq. ft. of printout at Arial 10pt"