Re: What is GUADEC?

["Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation" <director gnome org>]

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 10:05 +0100, Bill Haneman wrote:

> 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. 

There is proof in the pudding of just that - Extremadura, for example,
sending nearly 20 people to Dublin to learn more, so when they could go
home and implement.

>  The fact that GUADEC is full of technically astute 
> hackers _including the core platform developers_ is something few 
> conferences can offer.  

True - GUADEC's core competency.

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 09:34 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:

> a large portion of the attendees were either completely uninterested
> in the first two days, or completely uninterested in the 3rd.

The evaluation forms submitted stated did not state that.  Owen, jrb and
I have tabulated the GUADEC evaluation forms to publish soon.

> If it's outreach, who are we reaching out to?

Certainly people like the those at GUADEC 6 who wrote: 
 
"I've only been a recent GNOME user, but this conference has made me really enthusiastic 
about becoming a part of it."

"Coming from the German administration, I am aware of the fact that I have been 
"OSS-socialized" within a KDE environment. Therefore, it was very interesting for me 
to get to now some faces and aspects of a different community."

tim