Re: Some perspective on how unimportant the board currently is.

[Germán Poó Caamaño <gpoo ubiobio cl>]

El vie, 28-10-2005 a las 10:56 -0400, Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation
escribió:
> On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 15:31 +0700, Ross Golder wrote: 
> > On ศ., 2005-10-28 at 15:07 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> > > Perhaps we should look at the idea of running training sessions where
> > > the trainers are not paid, but are given plane tickets and board in the
> > > city they are sent to.
> > > 
> > I'd rather we were all thinking about schemes like this, than trying to
> > decide how big our board should be :) Let's just vote and get on with
> > better things.
> 
> Such efforts go a long way.
> 
> The training Federico Mena Quintero's training sessions at Forum GNOME
> in Brasil <http://forumgnome.com.br/> is a stellar example of regional
> GNOME developer training. Sponsorship from Novell, Friends of GNOME and
> others helped make the training and free distribution of GNOME 2 books
> possible.  Local conferences and hackfests, such as those in Spain,
> Australia and Bangalore also brought new developers to the platform.  
> 
> Ross has looked into doing this in Bangkok and I am talking to potential
> local organizers for such training in China.

IMHO, it could be approached just a little different.  And I will
speak in my perspective from Chile (as far as Australia is) and my
experience organizing/attending to a different conferences.

I was talking about the following idea with Murray Cumming the last
day at GUADEC:

Instead of giving a couple of talks in one or two days, just give
a comprehensive workshop in one week (5 days) with 4 or 5 speakers.
For instance, every day between 09:00 until 15:00 hrs, taking time
for some break from time to time.

Advantadges:

- For learners:
  - Get motivation of learn from "big-names" hackers.
  - To have the chance to receive a comprehensive crash course
    (much better than one or two hours of speech)
  - To have the chance of put in practice in the afternoon 

- For Speakers:
  - They has the rest of the day:
    - To hack with other hackers/speakers; or
    - To report some work with their companies; or
    - To meet other people/companies; or
    - To share with attendants

Requirements:
- Good bandwidth.
- A hacking room (not a very fashion one, but comfortable).
- Work with an small group (may be 10 or 15).  I'm thinking in
  students, because of the availability to stay one week 
  dedicated to learn GNOME, but dependes of the period of year
  or any other special situation.

For instance, if we can bring some hackers working in the 
"perfomance team"; they will have the chance to work with 
their partners together after 15:00; as I suppossed was 
the Summit.  Speakers won't feel alone, ever.

Normally people must to travel on weekend and get back the 
next weekend.  So, I'm proposing to use the whole week.
With 4 or 5 hackers.  It terms of "time" costs, it's the
same for long trips; so it's a kind of factorization.

To get prepared the people, it's needed that local speakers
prepare them the week before or so in almost the same way.

A little variation could be: 4 days for workshop; and the
last day, a big one conference to get more people motivated
for the next one.

The highest cost are the tickets.  The facilities in universities
is possible to get for free (at least I can get it here), etc.

-- 
Germán Poó Caamaño
http://www.ubiobio.cl/~gpoo/