On Mon, 2005-08-01 at 17:53 -0700, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller">
>
> > > At least one reason... there were a number of things that didn't work
> > > well in Stuttgart that need to be fixed. We once again had too many
> > > parallel sessions, too much stuff on the schedule, too many
> > > unanticipated sessions that had to be added in the weeks before the
> > > conference.
> >
> > What is the rationale to claim we had too many sessions at GUADEC in
> > Stuttgart? I hear this repeated by some as an absolute truth, but I never
> > seen anyone give any explanation for it.
>
> It comes from the belief that GUADEC should be less about preaching, more
> about participation. So the more talk sessions you have, the less BOF and
> hacktime sessions you have.
>
> > Also as far as I know there wasn't any non-userday tracks that where
> > consistently lacking participants, rather the opposite.
>
> Yes, they were very successful. We had an awesome line-up of talks! However,
> the view David is putting forward is not based on whether that model can be
> successful, it's whether we want to pursue that model at all... Is GUADEC
> meant to be a bunch of talks, or is it meant to be a whole lotta discussion
> and hacking?
GUADEC is our only general-audience conference ... while I'm sure that
we could have an awesome event where the GNOME hackers get together and
talk and hack for a few days or longer, I don't think GUADEC is *just*
about this. (The Boston GNOME summit, by contrast, is designed as purely
a hacker get-together)
Hacking sessions and detailed planning sessions aren't that interesting
to a general audience ... even an intensely technical general audience.
I think we should expect that with the strong GNOME user community in
Spain we'll get even more people who are coming in, not interested
in say, whether we should ship gnome-sm-proxy in the next release,
but in getting a high-level picture of new and upcoming features
and technologies. In learning about where to start developing with
GNOME. In learning how to use GNOME in advanced ways.
Giving talks to each other shouldn't be the way we do planning and
technical development, but I think the core GNOME developers have an
obligation to put on an event that really is exciting and interesting
to the people that come.
The data that we really should pull in here is the Survey's from
this year's GUADEC. That we don't have them collated yet is my
fault, largely. Having half the pile on my desktop I just went
through 30 of them and looked at a few things:
Balance of events:
More Less
Technical talks: 15 1
Tutorials: 14 3
BOFS: 12 4
Unscheduled time: 15 4
You can draw your own conclusions from those numbers (We'll try
hard to get a more complete tally soon), but I'm certainly not
getting a feeling that there's support for changing the entire
structure of GUADEC.
In terms of the questions:
2. What talk at the conference did you enjoy most
3. What other talks did you attend and find useful
The answers from those 30 questionaires (not everybody replied
to the questions) were;
Eclipse GCJ; Beagle, Gnome marketing
Dreamworks; Shuttleworth
Seth's talk with the condom tied with Jeff's 10x0; Keith Packard's,
Cairo, Beagle, Software patents, lightning talks, Miguel's keynote,
panel applets
Topaz; Cairo, Beagle
Lighting talks; Topaz, Cairo, Localized free desktop
Robert Love on performance; Seth's opening talk
Migration from Windows
Keynotes and Eclipse; Lightning talks, how to contribute to GNOME,
101 things to know
Freedesktop, GNOME-Java; Beagle
GNOME meeting
Cairo; x.org
Flumotion, gnome-meeting; Anna's usability talk
Dreamworks; LTSP, 101 things about GNOME
Anna's usability; Flumotion
Optimal GNOME programming; Shuttleworth's keynote
Flumotion; Cairo
Kudznetsky;
101 things about GNOME; Cairo, Eclipse
Robert Love; 101 things, freedesktop, flumotion
Ubuntu;
Flumotion; 101 things about GNOME, Dreamworks,
interop standards + OSS, Eclipse, advanced unit testing
Software patents; Cairo, Topaz, Beagle, 101 things, Dreamworks
Again, I'll let you draw your own conclusions; in general, though the
broad range of stuff mentioned indicates to me that we aren't doing a
bad job of programming GNOME and that removing talks in favor of
exclusively BOFS and hackfests would be a mistake.
Regards,
Owen
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part