Re: What is GUADEC?

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 9/8/05, Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation <director gnome org> wrote:
> 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.

The people who were bored out of their minds (including all the
government types) *left* before the end of the conference. I heard of
one speaker who said on stage into the mic 'there aren't many people
here, are there.' That was a totally, totally embarassing moment.

Let's be very clear- we have a conference for hackers that interests
several hundred people, and we have a separate conference for business
and government that interests dozens, and there is very little overlap
between those two groups. I'm not clear why we continue to insist that
they be done together, when doing them separately would allow us to do
each of them much better than we currently do them.
 
> > 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."

Handfuls of anecdotes and a completely flawed survey do not disprove
what I think everyone plainly sees- that the attendance on the
government and business day is *embarassing* to us, and that most of
the people who attended would have come away with a bad impression of
GNOME.

Luis