Re: Desktop Summit Planning

[Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org>]

El dt 13 de 12 de 2011 a les 21:42 -0600, en/na Brian Cameron va
escriure:
> GNOME Foundation Members:

(....)

> 3. The GNOME community has been having trouble finding volunteers to
>     help make events successful lately.  Some people like Dave Neary,
>     Lennart Poettering, and Ekaterina Gerasimova did a great job
>     volunteering to make the last Desktop Summit a success.  However,
>     the fact that there were too few volunteers engaged caused some real
>     issues.  Many of the things GNOME folks have complained about the
>     last Desktop Summit were caused more by a lack of GNOME volunteers
>     helping than anything else.  For a Desktop Summit to be successful,
>     we need to more clearly see that the GNOME community is more
>     interested to engage and wanting to get involved.

Lennart and Patricia already told much about the lack (or lack of)
volunteers.

Some of my favourite memories of being a happy GNOME volunteer on
GUADECs are:

* One solution that was used on Vilanova's GUADEC was to make all
attendees who got sponsorship to help, at least for one or two hours.

"We (the GNOME Foundation) has paid you (the happy sponsorshpied GNOME
contributor) a small/big amount of money, apart from coding and regular
contributions to GNOME, contribute on making the GUADEC rock." <- for me
this is perfectly understandable, anyone could have problems with that?

I also thing that making as much attendees being volunteers also helps
make the GUADEC more ease and enjoyable, you feel more part of it as you
help make it successful.

* Starting the conference with the core days is trying to make
volunteers and organizers go away. *Never*, really, *never* start with
core days! Just with one or two days of side tracks or hackfest or
parties is enough to recruit the volunteers, show them the venue, the
registration process and what not.

* What I'm also missing a lot from Vilanova's conference was the evening
(10-15 minutes) meetings for all volunteers to express their goods and
bads from the conference day that just happened and to highlight (from
the organizers) the possible hiccups of the next day, so that you can be
aware that +300 attendees are going to come to get registered in half an
hour in the morning.

Thanks for bringing the topic in December so that we still have time to
fix it!

Cheers,

> Thanks,
> 
> Brian


-- 
Gil Forcada

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