Re: [guadec-list] Re: Barcelona report




Hi,

Owen Taylor a écrit :
GUADEC is our only general-audience conference ... while I'm sure that
we could have an awesome event where the GNOME hackers get together and
talk and hack for a few days or longer, I don't think GUADEC is *just*
about this. (The Boston GNOME summit, by contrast, is designed as purely
a hacker get-together)

One of the things that became obvious this year is that GUADEC does not have enough time to be all things to all people. We have a core audience of hackers, contributors and enthusiasts which we should cater to in priority.

You say that GUADEC is a general-audience conference - but did we have substantial attendance from local business, LUGs, universities, politicians? There were some talks oriented that way, but they were poorly attended because the audience they were intended for wasn't there in numbers.

Hacking sessions  and detailed planning sessions aren't that interesting
to a general audience ... even an intensely technical general audience.

If we concentrate on catering to free software enthusiasts in priority, we will not disappoint our core hackers.

I think we should expect that with the strong GNOME user community in
Spain we'll get even more people who are coming in, not interested
in say, whether we should ship gnome-sm-proxy in the next release,
but in getting a high-level picture of new and upcoming features
and technologies. In learning about where to start developing with
GNOME. In learning how to use GNOME in advanced ways.

That's exactly the kind of GUADEC I would like to offer.

Balance of events:
More Less Technical talks: 15 1
 Tutorials:          14     3
 BOFS:               12     4
 Unscheduled time:   15     4

You can draw your own conclusions from those numbers (We'll try
hard to get a more complete tally soon), but I'm certainly not
getting a feeling that there's support for changing the entire
structure of GUADEC.

It's great to have some numbers. The numbers will tell us in some sense what the people who attend GUADEC would like it to be about. It won't help us decide (and that's the open question right now) what type of audience we would like to have at GUADEC. Personally I'm happy with the audience we have, although I would like to have a little more effort put into having user groups in the area present next year.

In terms of the questions:

 2. What talk at the conference did you enjoy most
 3. What other talks did you attend and find useful

The answers from those 30 questionaires (not everybody replied
to the questions) were;

Eclipse GCJ; Beagle, Gnome marketing
Dreamworks; Shuttleworth
Seth's talk with the condom tied with Jeff's 10x0; Keith Packard's,
  Cairo, Beagle, Software patents, lightning talks, Miguel's keynote,
  panel applets
Topaz; Cairo, Beagle
Lighting talks; Topaz, Cairo, Localized free desktop
Robert Love on performance; Seth's opening talk
Migration from Windows
Keynotes and Eclipse; Lightning talks, how to contribute to GNOME, 101 things to know
Freedesktop, GNOME-Java; Beagle
GNOME meeting
Cairo; x.org
Flumotion, gnome-meeting; Anna's usability talk
Dreamworks; LTSP, 101 things about GNOME
Anna's usability; Flumotion
Optimal GNOME programming; Shuttleworth's keynote
Flumotion; Cairo
Kudznetsky;
101 things about GNOME; Cairo, Eclipse
Robert Love; 101 things, freedesktop, flumotion
Ubuntu;
Flumotion; 101 things about GNOME, Dreamworks,
   interop standards + OSS, Eclipse, advanced unit testing
Software patents; Cairo, Topaz, Beagle, 101 things, Dreamworks

Again, I'll let you draw your own conclusions; in general, though the
broad range of stuff mentioned indicates to me that we aren't doing a
bad job of programming GNOME and that removing talks in favor of
exclusively BOFS and hackfests would be a mistake.

The notable thing about this is that the only talks which get a mention from day 3 are
 - 101 things about GNOME
 - GNOME meeting
 - Software patents
 - Dan Kudsnetsy
 - Nathan Wilson
 - Beagle
 - Interop and Open Source

While it's a small sample, this suggests that the people who come to GUADEC like the keynotes we've gotten, and like talks about the software more than the talks about politics and more general "free software and society" type talks.

This is hardly surprising, given that it's a conference about GNOME. I would like to see us reinforce this next year, and try to target talks about our software to the public sector and small businesses, rather than have enterprise or the public sector come and talk about their needs (although a little bit of both is no harm).

Cheers,
Dave.

--
David Neary
bolsh gimp org





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