Re: Meeting Minutes Published - January 7, 2010

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico novell com>]

On Tue, 2010-01-19 at 13:09 -0600, Brian Cameron wrote:

>      * Co-locating in 2011. Vincent talked to Cornelius Schumacher, and
>        the KDE community is very interested in co-locating. The GNOME
>        board would like to first discuss with the advisory board before
>        making any decisions, so this is a topic for the next advisory
>        board meeting.

Co-location would be awesome.

Dave Neary and I had a brief chat during GCDS about how we could
co-locate better.  Behold our observations on the spacetime implications
of co-located conferences:

The schedules for the KDE and the GNOME tracks need to coincide.  During
GCDS, the schedules of Akademy and GUADEC didn't coincide, that is, the
talks were not scheduled at the same times and they did not have the
same duration.  So, one almost never had a chance to see people from
the other project - when you were in a break they were in the talks, and
vice-versa.

There needs to be a physical "central common area" where people can
mingle, get some networking, and communicate.  The GCDS auditorium, a
postmodern fantasy where structure does *not* follow social spaces [1],
had no default central meeting area.  People scattered around to find a
place to sit in small groups and converse.  Coupled with the lack of
synchronized schedules, this made it really hard to see people from the
other project.  If the chosen venue doesn't have a physical common area,
we sould delimit a place so that psychologically you *want* to be there
when you are not attending a talk.

Were the lightning talks combined, or were they separated between
GNOME/KDE?  I can't remember.  They need to be combined so that both
projects get to see each other's cool stuff :)

[1]
http://vasarhelyi.eu/books/A_pattern_language_book/apl205/apl205.htm 
[2] Hot damn, the entire "A pattern language" online!
http://vasarhelyi.eu/books/A_pattern_language_book/apl.htm


  Federico