Re: Guadec focus.

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Hey Miguel,

> 	Summary: I think that we should make a departure from the
> 	traditional Linux-like conference which has been centered 
> 	around new developments, and instead focus on explaining our 
> 	technology to newcomers.

To some extents I completely agree - we need to start pushing our
technology out there, and try and get more people developing on our
desktop. However, I'm just a little bit worried that right now, doing
such a thing isn't necessarily going to bring heaps of new developers to
the conference. GUADEC at the moment has always been pretty 'GNOME
developer' centric, in that 90% of the people who attend are pretty core
contributors to the project. This has changed in the last year or two,
where we've managed to attract developers outside the immediate project,
which has been good to see.

[shrug]

>      I feel that  asking people to present papers on research topics or
> new developments is going to lead to few papers, or repeating something
> that we already know in the form of a paper with small incremental
> changes.

Totally agree on this - people do actually present the same types of
papers showing the progress of our project. It's nice to see because it
gives you the full perspective of what's happened in the last year, but
I imagine it might get tiresome after a while.

>      Maybe we should focus more on making GUADEC have sessions
> describing technologies, and our focus should not be
> paper-presentation, but trying to find people interested in doing one
> hour or two hour sessions on GNOME and related technologies. 

I like the idea of Linux Conf Australia's tutorial day, where we
carefully select 4 people to give half day tutorials, designed
specifically for new developers. It's worked really well over there, and
creates a good introduction to the main conference. The list of
potential topics creates a pretty awesome starting point - perhaps it's
not too late to try this out for GUADEC 5.

On a side note, I think we totally need to cut down the numbers of
talks. In Dublin we had 4 rooms for 3 days - holding something like 60+
talks. That's *way* too intense, and doesn't really provide much time to
sit down with other people - which I believe, is more crucial that any
of the talks.

I'd ideally like to see something along the lines of -

Day 1
=====
	9:00			Welcome to GUADEC
	9:30		Tutorial A		Tutorial B
	1:30			Lunch
	2:30		Tutorial C		Tutorial D
	5:30			Dinner, Beers, ....

Day 2 & 3
=========
	 9:00			Keynote
	10:00		Talk 1		Talk 2		Talk 3
	11:00		Hacking/Talking/Brainstorming/User BOF's/FIXits
 	 1:00			Lunch
	 2:00			Keynote
	 3:00		Talk 4		Talk 5		Talk 6
	 4:00		Hacking/Talking/Brainstorming/User BOF's/FIXits
	 6:00			Dinner, Beers, .....

So, that's cutting down from 60+ talks, to 12! We could potentially add
another track bringing it to 16, which seems ok too. The idea of this is
that you would have a limited number of really good papers and plenty of
time discussion. It's probably a big departure from the norm, but I
think it could be more effective.

Glynn