Re: Desktop Summit Planning

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Foundation:

> A point of clarification:
>
> On Wed 14 Dec 2011 04:42, Brian Cameron<brian cameron oracle com>  writes:
>
> > 3. The GNOME community has been having trouble finding volunteers to
> >     help make events successful lately.
>
> You mention that we had a problem with this in the last Desktop Summit.
> Has this been a problem in other events as well?

Yes, as you might remember, we have had difficulties organizing the
Boston Summit this past year, ending up relocating the event to
Montreal rather last minute.  Also, most of the volunteers who have
made GNOME.Asia successful the past few years have indicated that they
are stepping down, so the future of GNOME.Asia is unclear and plans are
behind normal schedule.  We need volunteer help in these areas badly.
If we want to have the Boston Summit at MIT again, I believe we need
to secure rooms in the next month or two.  Any volunteers?  We need
help in these areas.

Over the years, GNOME community events have grown in frequency, size
and the expectations of hosting professional quality events.  It is a
challenge for a volunteer community to keep up with consistently year
after year.  Currently, events tend to be planned in isolation and
there is too much reinventing of wheels.  GUADEC planning, for example,
tends to mostly be done by the team who won the bid, and their ability
to put together a good event does vary quite a bit from year to year.
Fortunately, the 2012 GUADEC Planning team does seem to be in good
shape, so this is one upcoming event that I am not so concerned about.

I am happy to hear several people report positively about the GNOME
volunteer presence at the Desktop Summit, and I apologize for not
mentioning the name of every volunteer who did a great job helping to
make the event successful, such as Patricia Santana Cruz, Chris Kühl,
Jon Nordby, Stormy Peters, Andreas Nilsson, and and William from
Texas.  I am sure there are many more who have not yet been mentioned.

That said, I do think that the last Desktop Summit event suffered from
a general lack of participation on the GNOME side of things.  When we
were unable to find a sponsor for GNOME social events, alternatives
were not organized, for example.  GNOME was unable to find resources to
help with infrastructure issues, such as identify management or helping
to setup a registration system (a longstanding problem we seem to have
year after year).  More seriously, a event like the Desktop Summit
should inspire collaborative work and there did not seem to be enough
effort in terms of planning concrete collaborative activities.  If we
are to hold Desktop Summits in the future, I think we need to focus
more energy in these areas to make them successful.

I am not trying to make volunteers who did a great job feel badly that
they did not do enough.  Instead, I am trying to highlight that the
amount of work is great and growing.  We need to consider how to
better address this going forward.  How we can ramp up the energy?  If
the workload is too great, should we scale back our event planning
efforts, or find help in other ways (e.g. perhaps by hiring more event
planning help)?

Brian