Re: Desktop Summit Planning

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com> wrote:

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.

So, speaking as someone who was part of an organizing committee for Plumbers.  Linux foundation knows how to do conferences, and do them professionally.  How about co-location with a Linux Foundation conference?  For instance, having Plumbers conference with a desktop conference would be quite interesting I think considering the direction we are moving towards.  A vertical platform, this might be more interesting.

Something else to consider when thinking about Boston Summit.

 

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.

There are several things that we can learn from Linux Foundation on how to run conferences.

My overall feeling is that we're moving towards a platform based end state that doesn't really mix that well with other desktop projects.  I think there are definitely some cross work at the lower layers that we can work on but it seems that there should be a "freedesktop.org" conference or some such, not a GNOME/KDE.  Shouldn't those folks step up and do something like that?

My two cents.

sri