Re: Desktop Summit Planning

[john palmieri <john j5 palmieri gmail com>]

2011/12/14 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
>
Freedesktop.org doesn't have the same organizational structures that
gnome and kde have.  It isn't so much a community as a set of servers,
admins and developers.  It is more of a meeting place on the interwebs
than an organization - an official DMZ for the various desktop
communities.  They don't have the structure to actually run a
conference but it might be worth exploring having a conference under
the fd.o banner where the conference is run much like we run the
Desktop Summit but doesn't cannibalize our respective flagship
conferences.  The issue though is getting sponsorship to get the right
people there and make it successful.  I don't know if there will be
support from companies for yet another conference.  One of the
advantages cited by companies for the Desktop Summit is that they
don't have to send their employees to two different conferences though
I think that is short sighted as less tends to get done at these
larger events.

--
J5