Jeff asked for a mid term strategy relating to the evolution of the GUADEC site and the Drupal CMS to be installed for this event. Proposal: - Leave guadec.org as an archive and go for events.gnome.org. There is not a strong reason to have the GUADEC separated from the rest of gnome.org. There is no reason to make a big distinction between the GUADEC and other face to face meetings such as the Boston Summit or the regional meetings such as the GUADEC-ES, Fórum GNOME... events.gnome.org would be about meeting somewhere in the world. From big events 100% GNOME to local events 98% GNOME and also FLOSS & IT events where GNOME has a presence, and GNOME hackers and users have an opportunity to meet. Most of the events and meetings have most of the requirements in common: calendar, schedule, about, participants, speakers, registration, merchandising, on-line materials, coverage... We could offer a common umbrella to these events, offering a set of services they may use or they may skip by using their own website as they are doing now. In this context the GUADEC would have its own pages and sections identified, but it would not be an isolated subsite. It would gain volume and importance in the website as its volume and importance increases in the GNOME community. Once the event is done it would decrease slowly leaving more space to next events such as the Boston Summit. In the meantime small events, participation in fairs could be reported and organized here. Currently they are mentioned in mailing lists or in n the means of communication used locally by the local event. In the gnome.org website these events almost don't exist. events.gnome.org could solve this without adding much effort to the effort already invested to the GUADEC. - Using events.gnome.org as a channel of communication open to the participants before and after the event. Most of the times we feel that we could have made better use of the GUADEC days, willing to have more previous time to prepare and more time after to go deeper in the discussions, get to conclusions... events.gnome.org would be perfect for this. Someone interested in attending to the GUADEC7 could contact fellows through the site previously, could warm up the debate, could have a better idea of what are the talks about and what have the speakers in mind. - The organisation of the events itself could be managed in events.gnome.org. Imagine the difference between asking for ideas about good keynotes in the gnome-list only or in this list and events.gnome.org (equipped with RSS and the like). - The combination of several GNOME related events under events.gnome.org would give us an interesting list of registered users: the people that has attended or has an interested to attend to a GNOME event. These people want to know more about GNOME and they possibly want to receive news and announcements, become a member of the Foundation, make a donation, buy a T-Shirt, present a paper in the next edition... This has a connection with the Friends of GNOME database discussed months ago - http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-web-list/2005-July/msg00013.html . In that discussion the almost-conclusion seemed to be using CiviCRM, which is a Drupal module - http://drupal.org/node/33464 - To start with, events.gnome.org would have a degree of autonomy in layout and navigation similar to art.gnome.org, which is also managed by a CMS (developed from scratch in GNOME?). Later on (say past the GUADEC) if we are happy with this system we can create new Drupal instances (sharing templates and some tables such as users) for foundation.gnome.org and the users' site. No, no need to touch anything under developer.gnome.org. :) -- Quim Gil http://interactors.coop | http://desdeamericaconamor.org
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature