Report of the GNOME Project Day at foss.in/2007

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay <sankarshan mukhopadhyay gmail com>]

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Hi,

At foss.in/2007, there was a GNOME Project Day. Details of the talks for
the GNOME Project can be found at http://foss.in/2007/schedules/

foss.in/2007 had as a stated and underlying theme "Building the
Community". While GNOME has had an enthusiastic and active presence in
India there has been a distinct lack of cohesion and convergence of
thought which indicates a common purpose. The GNOME Project Day
primarily aimed to achieve two things [0]:

+ demonstrate how to contribute to GNOME
+ creating a community of evangelists and GNOME developers who can
participate in development, bug triage and related issues

As it turned out a fair bit of "parking lot" discussions happened and
those included such topics like "how to learn what to teach so that
folks can begin contribution", "how to localize documentation",
"existence of online translation tools" and such

This was the first time that there were "Project Days" at foss.in and
naturally there was no indicators of what would work and what would not.
The delegate statistics [1] were not of much help in terms of predicting
turn out. So when we were there at the venue with the goodies [2] the
size of the audience was a bit of a let down. In fact right before we
started, we had more speakers than audience. Not good. So out went the
speakers to try and rustle up some audience.

It worked.

And when we did hit the second talk [3] we had managed to fill up more
than 50% of the hall capacity. From there on, the crowd just kept
growing till we ended up with stairs filling up [4]

Nearly all the talks had brisk question answer sessions (including [3]
where there was a smallish nearly OT discussion on fonts and branding)
and of course when the eye candy talk [5] came up, there were more of
the ooh and aahs that go with a nice show-n-tell.

Post lunch talks did not have the expected downward spiral of delegates
but more of a “sit on the stairs and listen” kind of attendance. Plenty
of questions, some interesting exchanges and of course the usual
glitches with the projector [6] were also part of what happened. All
said and done, by the time it was the last talk from Naba Kumar [7] , we
were pretty happy with the way things turned out.

Runa [8] carried forward the talk on GTP into the IndLinux BoF
particularly in the areas of increasing number of languages.

Mairin Duffy summed up the GNOME Project Day [9]

I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation (and Board) for providing
funds that ensured Mairin Duffy could travel to foss.in and we could
have swag (I am yet to see another instance of badges/buttons flying out
so fast). I would also thank the Marketing Team who ensured that the
GNOME Project Day was reflected on the front page of www.gnome.org (in
spite of me providing them the information at the nearly last moment)

There were moments of hilarity including one where Lennart [10] peppered
the crowd with swag (badges) and they went wild.

Lessons learnt which can be re-used for later events:

+ co-ordinate with speakers and organizers to ensure that impromptu
parking lots can be arranged
+ be wary of laptops with Nvidia cards
+ no amount of swag is ever enough - so don't try and compete with
others on swag
+ put in hands-on sessions evenly throughout the event
+ enter the event with at least 2 follow up events planned in advance
+ desktop bug hunting is more exciting than we think
+ have some video playing when speakers are in transit or lunch is in
session
+ get artwork for GNOME banners
+ get more GNOME posters

:sankarshan

[0] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-in-list/2007-November/msg00001.html
[1] http://foss.in/2007/register/delegates/stats.php
[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/runa-sankarshan/tags/gnomeswag/
[3] http://foss.in/2007/register/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=542
[4] http://www.flickr.com/photos/runa-sankarshan/2087878808/
[5] http://foss.in/2007/register/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=290
[6] http://foss.in/2007/register/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=319
[7] http://foss.in/2007/register/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=540
[8] http://foss.in/2007/register/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=265
[9] http://mihmo.livejournal.com/50541.html
[10] http://foss.in/2007/register/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=513


- --



You see things; and you say 'Why?';
But I dream things that never were;
and I say 'Why not?' - George Bernard Shaw
www.linkedin.com/in/sankarshan



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