title: About ApacheCon slug: index

ApacheCon is the official conference of the Apache Software Foundation. Its primary goals are education and community building. We try to produce one each calendar year somewhere in North America and Europe, and are working on expanding this to the rest of the world.

If you want to volunteer to help with ApacheCon, please join our mailing lists, and see what volunteer opportunities we have, bearing in mind that it sometimes gets out of date.

What Is An ApacheCon?

While ApacheCons vary from year to year and location to location, there are some components that you can count on happening at every ApacheCon.

  • ApacheCon has at least 4 tracks of technical content, and often more.
  • Projects, or groups of related projects, may request a dedicated track where they will provide a track chair, and have freedom to create their own content for a project/topic sub-conference. In this way, ApacheCon resembles a convention of Apache project conferences.
  • There will be a hackathon space where projects can gather to work on code, or work out community issues.
  • There will be a State of the Feather Keynote by the President or other officer, providing an overview of the ASF's accomplishments.
  • There will be a PGP key signing.
  • An Apache BarCamp will held, typically on the day before or after the main event.
  • The event is usually 3 days or more.

ApacheCon is the one annual event for the particular continent in question. As such, it draws an international audience, both in speakers and attendees.

The documentation around how to plan an ApacheCon may be found in the ApacheCon Playbook. Most planning tasks are done by volunteers who commit to help - at least a little - throughout the planning process for one specific conference.

You can find out more about what ApacheCon events are in the works on the ApacheCon website, and see what ApacheCons we've done in the past on archive.apachecon.com.

Other event types include: