Company-sponsored talks on dask accounts

[jsignell]

In the context of the website redesign, @jacobtomlinson @AdiReske and I were discussing what types of events are suitable for publicizing on the website "Events" page and from the dask twitter account. In particular Coiled often puts on events that are primarily about dask, but the context in which dask is running is always a coiled cluster.

Here is an example of this kind of content:
Recorded case-study about spark vs. dask: https://coiled.wistia.com/medias/kh04a24c2t

I tend to think that as long as the content is broadly informative about dask, then I am ok with it being publicized by the project, but we thought it would be best to ask the community what feels appropriate.

[AdiReske]

Hi, if there's no objection I'll share the recording of the webinar @jsignell on the Dask youtube channel and twitter and share the following upcoming event https://coiled.io/events/dask-over-spark-for-eo/ Please let me know if there are any issues with that. This is 99% about Dask and people's experience and advice around using Dask

[jacobtomlinson]

Thanks for raising this @jsignell.

I feel like there are a few subtly different categories of content that we are creating these days:

• Dask content created on company time with attribution - Feels like an open-source contribution.
• Dask content sponsored by a company with joint branding - Feels like a sponsored news article.
• Company content about Dask - Feels like an ad.

Each of those categories is useful, and companies in the Dask community should be making them all. I do think it is an important distinction to make though as while they all benefit the Dask Community the first is a direct benefit, and the other two can create indirect benefits.

Here's my take on how we should make decisions about links:

Linking to Dask Community content like this Anaconda attributed blog post or this NVIDIA attributed blog post should be considered internal links and shouldn't raise any debate.

For content that I would consider sponsored like the recent "Spark vs Dask | Why We Switched from Spark to Dask | Sébastien Arnaud at Steppingblocks" and the other EO one that @AdiReske linked it feels a little more grey. If you look through the Steppingblocks video it is fully Coiled branded, spends about 10% of the time talking about Coiled specifically and mentions Coiled generally throughout so it almost falls into category three. But the general intent is to highlight folks switching from Spark to Dask and spends a lot of time talking about why Dask is great so that's why I would put it in category two and I would be happy to link it from Dask Community pages.

Then there are other pages that feel like the NVIDIA Glossary page about Dask. It is a very NVIDIA specific page, it gives useful information about Dask and the fact that it exists is good for the community, but the intent is to lead folks towards NVIDIA's commercial offerings. So unless we want to link to it to say "isn't it cool that these big companies like Dask" we shouldn't really be directing folks there from Dask Community pages.

So when having discussions like this about what we should and shouldn't link I would suggest that category 1 is always a yes, category 3 is always a no, and category 2 is up to our judgement and should possibly be debated on a case-by-case basis. For example having someone external to Coiled quickly glance over Coiled content and give a thumbs up seems fine for category 2 things.

Another thing we could do more of that I mentioned in dask/dask-blog#135 (review) is to do all three for each noteworthy thing that companies want to talk about. We could have a community blog post with a simple attribution that links to sponsored content with dual branding that links to company content with company branding. For example with the recently dask-kubernetes work I've been doing I intent to write content like Dask on KubeFlow, RAPIDS on Kubeflow (powered by Dask) and NVIDIA GPU accelerated ETL on Kubeflow. Each one covers the same features but with different emphasis, use cases, levels of detail, etc and can be cross-linked from different properties for SEO goodness.