Re: What is GUADEC?
- From: Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>
- To: Dave Neary <dneary free fr>
- Cc: "Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation" <director gnome org>, guadec-planning <guadec-planning gnome org>, Foundation-List <foundation-list gnome org>
- Subject: Re: What is GUADEC?
- Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2005 10:05:59 +0100
I don't think we should eliminate the enterprise or government outreach
aspects of GUADEC - think how important deployments like Extremadura
have been (or should have been). However I think we should focus that
outreach to take advantage of our strengths.
In that way, enterprises and/or governments with interest in "the Free
Desktop" will know that GUADEC is the place to go for specific, targeted
discussions of issues of interest to them, from a highly technical and
expert perspective. The fact that GUADEC is full of technically astute
hackers _including the core platform developers_ is something few
conferences can offer. Instead of trying to "pull people in off the
street", so to speak, let's advertise the fact that GUADEC is the place
to go for answers, solutions, and open dialogue about issues of
importance to users.
What I'm suggesting is this: keep GUADEC a hacker's conference, but
specifically make it a place where users (especially technically savvy
users and institutional users) can engage with developers on technical
issues. This will not only be helpful to institutional users and
would-be deployers, in helping them understand what Gnome can do for
them, but also to Gnome developers, by helping us understand the
challenges and needs of the broader user community.
Bill
Dave Neary wrote:
Hi,
Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation a écrit :
On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 16:05 +0200, Quim Gil wrote:
For some the GUADEC is an opportunity to meet, for others is a way to
get new contributors, for others is a way to get some money for the
Foundation, for others is a way to enhance a common vision of GNOME,
for
others....
That's a fair summary of what the board has discussed, as recently as
June. Jonathan Blandford once termed GUADEC as GNOME's mothership, an
annual place to meet and recharge batteries. It has played at least
four important roles for GNOME and the foundation over the last six
years:
*Technical *Outreach *Community (Social)
*Fundraising
Press announcements about the event state:
About GUADEC
The GNOME User and Developer Europe Conference (GUADEC) is an annual
gathering of GNOME developers, enthusiasts and individual, business,
education and government users worldwide. It provides a forum for
members of the GNOME project to showcase their work and to discuss the
future of GNOME development. Housed in a different European country each
year, GUADEC is a catalyst for the future development and direction of
GNOME.
The point is, Tim, that is is huge. It's wide open. And aiming too
wide is at the root of the problems that there have been with GUADEC
over the past two years, where a large portion of the attendees were
either completely uninterested in the first two days, or completely
uninterested in the 3rd.
Aiming a conference at "developers, enthusiasts and individual,
business, education and government users worldwide" is madness. We
might as well say "everybody", and be done with it.
If it's outreach, who are we reaching out to?
There is no argument on at least 2 of the points - everyone who goes
sees GUADEC as a technical, social conference. No-one disagrees with
having outreach either - but I would prefer to see us reaching out to
people just off our radar - converting GNOME users into advocates,
converting local free software developers into GNOME developers, and
converting local hobbyists into free software and GNOME users.
The ROI for the enterprise & government outreach has been small, and
I'm not sure we should continue it.
Cheers,
Dave.
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