Re: Free Desktop Communities come together at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On 08/12/2009 09:22 AM, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> Maybe if the foundation's board would more clearly articulate why
> exactly we can't do a co-located event*next*  year, they'll convince the
> community about their decision? Why didn't they?

My personal view as a board member:

Individual board members talked to various people to get a sense of what 
people are concerned about.  For me, for example, I was personally very 
excited about the event and almost everyone I talked to wanted to see us doing 
it again next year.  Given the survey results, seems like I'm only connected 
to about 55% of the community ;-).

So, we knew that a slight majority of the community wants to do it again next 
year, but there is also a non-negligible part that prefers to not do it again 
next year, perhaps do again the year after or whenever else it seems appropriate.

Then we have to consider the logistics of doing it.  It's no unknown fact that 
running GUADEC is a HARD task.  What's not very widely known is running a 
co-located event is *even* harder.  If we keep doing it, we eventually will 
gain from learning by doing and only then can start to see positive returns to 
scale, but in the short term, say next year, the total experience would have 
been inferior to a non-colocated event.

Let me rephrase it.  This is what I said on the board call:  I don't see us 
(on the GNOME side) putting a lot more effort on the event next year, so I 
don't think we will fix most issues with this year's event.  So I'd rather we 
do a Rocking GUADEC instead, give us some more time to get closer to KDE by 
doing smaller events, and hopefully do a joint event later when we have a 
closer working relationship.

It's not to say that the event this year didn't really rock.  It did.  But the 
GNOME scheduling for example, was inferior to any GUADEC I've seen.
(Yes, I can be blamed for that.)


behdad