What I expect from you, as a track chair, is three things:

• Subscribe to the planners@apachecon.com mailing list and follow discussion there. Send email to planners-subscribe@apachecon.com to subscribe.
• Provide a schedule of talks that will fill your track
• You will promote this track to your topic community, both inside, and outside of the community.

Exactly how this works is largely up to you.

For #2, there are two possible ways that you might handle it.

1) (The way that I, personally, prefer that you do it.) YOU decide what story you want to tell about your topic/project/community/thingy. YOU decide what talks/topics will tell that story, and find the right people to give those talks. Whether you do this through invited speakers, some kind of internal CFP, or in conjunction with the main event CFP, I really don't care. What I care about is that you hand me a schedule of talks, complete with the metadata that I will require (speaker info, talk info, etc - more on this later), and a handful of backup speakers in case of emergency.

2) We expect to have an event CFP next week some time. When that CFP closes, you trawl through the list of submitted talks, and claim some of them. This must be done in some transparent way, since you won't be the only one selecting content.

Whichever one of these approaches you take, your process must be transparent to the rest of the content chairs (and to me) so that we do not end up with duplicate content (**), speakers in two rooms at the same time, or massive holes in our story telling. That transparency happens here, on this list. It will be noisy, and it will be messy, but we'll end up with an awesome schedule in the end.

A final warning about selecting your content: I do not yet know for certain how many sessions you will have. Assume 7 per day/track, but plan for maybe having to lose one of those, depending on how we distribute the keynotes. I know that this is frustrating, and we will try to resolve that ASAP. Related, if you have a keynote recommendation - particularly one that highlights your track - please let me know AS SOON AS POSSIBLE so that we can start contacting them.

For #3, I expect that you will a) publicize the event on your user and developer lists to solicit content, b) publicize your selected track, and the overall event schedule, on same, and c) work with me and the event marketing folks to figure out per-track promotional opportunities.

Some of the tracks, such as the Cloudstack Collaboration Conference, have established branding, and are awesome at promoting their event as a stand-alone thing, as well as promoting it as part of ApacheCon. Follow their lead on this.

Also, please look at the proposed event schedule. In particular, I need you to look at what other content is schedule concurrently with yours.

Figure out who the track chairs are for related or concurrent - and introduce yourself to them, and discuss how you are going to resolve content conflicts. How you are going to share and cross-promote content.

I am delegating a lot of trust in you, and I only know about half of you, so please speak up if you have any concerns about how you're going to execute on this. We are trusting our 20th anniversary event to you, and I want you to appreciate the weight of that, but also know that I am always here to assist in any way that I can.

--Rich, VP Events, ASF

** Related story: At FOSDEM this year, I was looking at the schedule, and discovered that one speaker (who I won't name) was giving the same talk FIVE TIMES during the course of the event, because track chairs at FOSDEM never, ever, ever talk to each other.