Re: [guadec-list] Re: Barcelona report

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

On Wed, 2005-08-03 at 09:55 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Owen Taylor a �it :
> > 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.

I think when Owen said 'general audience' he meant it in terms of
non-core GNOME hackers, not necessarily 'civilians' :). The way we setup
up GUADEC in Stuttgart worked well in that regard that we had a good
selection of technical talks about GNOME technologies, but also about
related technologies which I think are just as important. 

I know there where people at GUADEC who came not because of the 'GNOME'
stuff but because of the multimedia and X/freedesktop related talks.
These are the kind of people we want to make part of the wider GNOME
community, increasing their interest in GNOME in order for them to have
a higher motivation to make sure whatever they are coding works well
with GNOME and integrates well with related GNOME technologies.

For instance the GStreamer community have a much closer relationship
with the Xiph.org community due to what happened during GUADEC in
Stuttgart. 

What I worry about is that if we cut heavily down on the number of talks
we end up with just a few talks on core GNOME technologies/issues and
loose this ability to pull other groups and developers closer to GNOME.

Christian

 

>