Dates & format for Desktop Summit 2011 announced

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi all,

As some of you may have noticed, the Desktop Summit dates, format and
location were announced today [1] - and we have an updated website
online [2].

Three things are worth singing out to GUADEC attendees as significant
differences from previous events.

First, the conference will be held later than usual, on 6-12 August.
This was a constraint imposed by the university, related to German
university schedules (students have classes in Germany right up to mid
July). This week was the earliest we could hold the conference.

Second is the conference format. We will be following roughly the same
format as we did in Gran Canaria - three days of organised talks and
keynotes, which will be held in four big lecture halls, and four days of
BOFs, hackfests and related activities. The foundation annual general
meeting is provisionally scheduled for Tuesday 9th, and teams will be
invited to schedule BOFs, team meetings, hackfests and related
attendee-generated content on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday -
there are a selection of rooms of varying sizes available for sessions
every day. The conference closing will thus be on Monday evening, before
the BOF days, since we expect that some people will decide to leave
before the end of the week.

Third, following a lot of feedback after Gran Canaria, the desktop
summit will have one papers committee made up of people from GNOME and
KDE this year. There will be one call for content, and the content
committee will decide on the presentations to accept together. This
should help overcome the impression that many people had last year that
Gran Canaria felt like two different conferences held in the same place
at the same time, but with no real interaction between the communities.
We also welcome proposals from outside KDE & GNOME this year.
Personally, I would love to see application developers building on the
platform giving us feedback on what they need, *and* core OS developers
whose work *we* build on come along to hear what we're missing.

This the Free Desktop Conference - it seems like a natural place for
people from Xorg, freedesktop.org and desktop applications to gather and
address common problems.

I've been told reliably that the board is planning on publishing the
feedback they received from attendees from this year's GUADEC soon - and
we have definitely taken this into account so far when planning the next
year's conference, within the constraints which we have.

I'm looking forward to a great conference!

Cheers,
Dave.

[1]
http://blogs.gnome.org/foundation/2010/10/06/kde-and-gnome-desktop-summit-2011-from-6-to-12-august/
[2] http://www.desktopsummit.org

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org