Re: [guadec-list] Key Note Speakers

[Paul Cooper <pgc openadvantage org>]

Hi Dave,

Sorry for lack of feedback - I've been away in deepest darkest Cornwall where there is no internet (it would appear). In general I think for the keynotes with need a mix of people from inside the OSS community, and those outside with interesting viewpoints. 

We were aiming to get invites out first thing in the new year - although first we need to finalise an ordered list of keynotes (or perhaps a set of ordered lists in the different types; Marketing, Technical, General, etc).

----- Dave Neary <dneary free fr> wrote:
> (resending from subscribed address)
[snip]
> Aside from gapminder: http://www.gapminder.org/ which I mentioned
> already, here's a scattering of ideas:
> 
>  - Tim Berners Lee
>  - Eben Moglen

Both these guys are great speakers but are the things they are likely to talk about directly on-topic. GPLv3 is clearly of more direct interest than the SEmantic Web and presumably the v3 question will come up at some stage but wouldn't a workshop or some more interactive discussion be more constructive than the (typically) one-way keynote?

>  - Donald Norman (author: "The design of Everyday Things") -
> http://www.jnd.org/
>  - Scott Berkun - http://www.scottberkun.com/
>  - Alan Cooper (Author: "The Inmates are Running the Asylum") -
> http://www.cooper.com

Any of these guys would be great - don't know enough about any of them to comment further.

>  - Seth Godin - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
>  - Guy Kawasaki - http://www.guykawasaki.com/

Both of these are excellent suggestions for 'marketing / evangelism' type speaker. Seth would probably be a slight preference just because there is a Google video of presentation he did at Google which was entertaining. It would be good if we could persuede them to also join in the marketing group discussions.

>  - Doc Searls - http://doc.weblogs.com/

Doc is one of my suggestions - in some ways he represents an interesting target audience. He wants to switch to a Linux laptop but can't quite abandon his Mac. For the last couple of years he's been lugging a powerbook and a thinkpad around trying to cure his addiction. 

>  - Joel Spolsky - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
>  - Eric Sink - http://www.ericsink.com/ (pretty windows oriented,
> though...)

Both of these guys would be good to give a more developer oriented talk - Joel would be my preference since he would seem to have more interest / awareness of open-source.

>  - Jonathan Schwarz (OK - risky having CEOs at the conference, but
> it'd
> be fun)

Jonathan would be great if we could get him - more likely that Simon Phipps would be available (and he'd be great too, but is a repeat offender - is that bad?).

>  - Ron Hovsepian (it'd be fun - bring your rotten tomatoes)

Don't know much about him (like is he even a good speaker) but it might be one way of getting press attention ;-)

>  - The Internet's Jono Bacon?

I was going to suggest Jono too, but then I thought it might be even better to have the whole LUGRadio team do a keynote. Perhaps they could do a series of 5 - 10 minute interviews? They are pretty creative so maybe just leave it to them and see what they come up with. Might be good for the closing keynote?

To add to the list;

Tim O'Reilly (Thos's suggestion) - Tim has family in the UK so is a possibility but it might be too close to OSCON.

Linda Stone - http://lindastone.net/ (rubbish site). Ex Apple and MS Research, coined the term Continuous Partial Attention (listen to the talk on ITConversations http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail739.html).

JP Rangaswami - http://confusedofcalcutta.com/. Ex CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort now CIO of BT Global services. Great thinker about the digital future, pro open-source, anti-drm - introduced wiki's and blogging at DrKW.

Don Marti (http://zgp.org/~dmarti/ although he now blogs at http://www.linuxworld.com/community/?q=blog/6) Ex editor of Linux Journal now working for LinuxWorld (so might be too close to SF expo for him to be this side of the pond). Lots of interesting opinion on Linux kernel, device drivers, and linux on laptops.

Hugh McCleod - http://www.gapingvoid.com/. Slightly left field suggestion. Blogger who helped build English Cut, and Stormhoek wine simply through his blog, cartoons, and word of mouth.

Steven O'Grady - http://redmonk.com/sogrady/ IT analyst, specialises in OSS, and uses a Linux + Gnome desktop. Lots of interesting thoughts and opinions.

Anyway we seem to have more than enough suggestions I guess we need to try to shortlist? I'll try to do one in the next couple of days.

Paul

> In general, I'm trying to think of people I know give a good
> presentation, which would be a little relevant to the community -
> someone in software is great, someone in design would be great,
> someone
> in technical writing or technical marketing would be OK (on the
> condition that they're interesting, and fun). I couldn't think of too
> many high-profile actual hackers that give good presentations,
> though...
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave.
> 
> -- 
> Dave Neary
> dneary free fr
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-- 
Paul Cooper                    |  Tel: 0121 634 1620
Assistant Director             |  Fax: 0121 634 1630
OpenAdvantage                  |  http://www.openadvantage.org