Re: Question for candidates

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 20 May 2014 11:36, David King <amigadave amigadave com> wrote:
> > One possible idea would be to have joint events with KDE.  One joint
> > event could cost less, in total, than two separate events.
>
>
> Thanks for pointing this out. As you can see from the income and expenses in
> the preliminary 2013 annual report, the Desktop Summit (co-located event
> with KDE) has traditionally been a much more profitable event for the
> Foundation than GUADEC.
>
> https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/AnnualReport/AnnualReport2014/Finances

that is a naive intepretation of the results of co-located desktop summit.

the desktop summits have been, historically, *less* profitable than
GUADEC for the foundation; the only reason why the 2011 one looks more
profitable when compared to the last two GUADECs is because the last
two GUADECs were in absolute terms less profitable; we spend more
money in getting more people at GUADEC, and we get fewer sponsors.

there's no guarantee we'd have more sponsors by co-locating GUADEC
with aKademy, and we'd still have to split the revenue of the
conference.

on top of that, there are the various issues that co-locating or
flagship conference entail, and that were discussed *at length* after
the 2009 and 2011 desktop summits.

> Even if a future Desktop Summit would be focused purely on co-location (as
> opposed to co-operation), it should reduce the costs of the event, and bring
> in more money for GNOME.

that's wishful thinking.

if we ever decided to cut costs on GUADEC by co-locating it, I'd
probably look into co-locating it with a conference that is more in
line with GNOME than aKademy. for downstream, there's the SUSE
conference or the Fedora Flock; for accessing the commercial side
there's the Linux Foundation. we could also look into EFF or FSF
Europe events, given the alignment of the interests.

> > I don't know what practical obstacles there might be, but in principle
> > I think it is ok.
>
>
> It has worked well twice before, so I think that any practical obstacles can
> be overcome.

I contend the idea that it (the desktop summit) worked "well" in any
way, shape, or form.

we've been doing much more solid work with the freedesktop.org
summit/hackfests than we ever did with the desktop summits, both in
terms of tangible results and community outreach.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/