Re: [guadec-list] Re: Barcelona report

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Owen Taylor a écrit :
> 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)

One of the things that became obvious this year is that GUADEC does not 
have enough time to be all things to all people. We have a core audience 
of hackers, contributors and enthusiasts which we should cater to in 
priority.

You say that GUADEC is a general-audience conference - but did we have 
substantial attendance from local business, LUGs, universities, 
politicians? There were some talks oriented that way, but they were 
poorly attended because the audience they were intended for wasn't there 
in numbers.

> Hacking sessions  and detailed planning sessions aren't that interesting
> to a general audience ... even an intensely technical general audience.

If we concentrate on catering to free software enthusiasts in priority, 
we will not disappoint our core hackers.

> 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.

That's exactly the kind of GUADEC I would like to offer.

> 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.

It's great to have some numbers. The numbers will tell us in some sense 
what the people who attend GUADEC would like it to be about. It won't 
help us decide (and that's the open question right now) what type of 
audience we would like to have at GUADEC. Personally I'm happy with the 
audience we have, although I would like to have a little more effort put 
into having user groups in the area present next year.

> 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.

The notable thing about this is that the only talks which get a mention 
from day 3 are
 - 101 things about GNOME
 - GNOME meeting
 - Software patents
 - Dan Kudsnetsy
 - Nathan Wilson
 - Beagle
 - Interop and Open Source

While it's a small sample, this suggests that the people who come to 
GUADEC like the keynotes we've gotten, and like talks about the software 
more than the talks about politics and more general "free software and 
society" type talks.

This is hardly surprising, given that it's a conference about GNOME. I 
would like to see us reinforce this next year, and try to target talks 
about our software to the public sector and small businesses, rather 
than have enterprise or the public sector come and talk about their 
needs (although a little bit of both is no harm).

Cheers,
Dave.

--
David Neary
bolsh gimp org