Re: What is GUADEC?

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 00:11 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 9/8/05, Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation <director gnome org> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 09:34 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> > 
> > > a large portion of the attendees were either completely uninterested
> > > in the first two days, or completely uninterested in the 3rd.
> > 
> > The evaluation forms submitted stated did not state that.  Owen, jrb and
> > I have tabulated the GUADEC evaluation forms to publish soon.
> 
> The people who were bored out of their minds (including all the
> government types) *left* before the end of the conference. I heard of
> one speaker who said on stage into the mic 'there aren't many people
> here, are there.' That was a totally, totally embarassing moment.

Yeah, I have to agree with Luis here. I can see the importance of doing
this, believe me, but if we're only getting a handful of people at these
talks, then we have seriously failed somewhere. While not all of the
content is boring, there's a lot of pretty uninteresting stuff there for
your average hacker.

> Let's be very clear- we have a conference for hackers that interests
> several hundred people, and we have a separate conference for business
> and government that interests dozens, and there is very little overlap
> between those two groups. I'm not clear why we continue to insist that
> they be done together, when doing them separately would allow us to do
> each of them much better than we currently do them.

Even inviting them and setting up individual BOFs specially tailored to
the people who are interested would be better than what we currently
have. Having a speaker in a room talking to a dozen or so scattered
around the conference theatre *is* embarrassing, and I think we should
reassess that.
 
> > > If it's outreach, who are we reaching out to?
> > 
> > Certainly people like the those at GUADEC 6 who wrote:
> > 
> > "I've only been a recent GNOME user, but this conference has made me really enthusiastic
> > about becoming a part of it."
> > 
> > "Coming from the German administration, I am aware of the fact that I have been
> > "OSS-socialized" within a KDE environment. Therefore, it was very interesting for me
> > to get to now some faces and aspects of a different community."
> 
> Handfuls of anecdotes and a completely flawed survey do not disprove
> what I think everyone plainly sees- that the attendance on the
> government and business day is *embarassing* to us, and that most of
> the people who attended would have come away with a bad impression of
> GNOME.

Right - yet none of those comments seem to be focused on any of the
government/business day talks. They're coming for the community, to meet
faces and engage in dialog.


Glynn