Re: Guadec focus.

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Sat, 2004-01-24 at 08:44, Glynn Foster wrote:
> 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.

This sounds like a promotion problem, the U in GUADEC is users.  Why
should a user come to a conference pimping[1] developer information? I
think pushing GNOME as a solution will attract more developers and users
than expounding the new APIs.

Off the top of my head, users might want to know how to leverage GNOME
to their benefit.  The Web site has long wanted case studies to explain
how GNOME works for users and enterprises.  By emphasizing usability,
accessibility, i18n, integration, return-on-investment, portability,
APIs, and support, I think more users, and more developers would
attend.  

> [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.

User and new developers probably don't need to see the progress of a
specific project.  They do need to see the momentum that the entire
GNOME project has, and they must be convinced that participating now has
an advantage over waiting for the next big thing.  Users need to know
that GNOME works now, and that their participation will make GNOME meet
more of their needs soon.

> >      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.

My IT department would be attracted to tutorials about setting up GNOME
on a number of desktops, integrating them with other services, and
administering them.  Tutorials that use a number of GNOME apps to solve
problems from office tasks to backend systems explain the big picture
better than a white paper expounding the merits of a single system.


1. I'm not Sri, I've just been listening to him

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.