Re: Barcelona report

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller a �it :
> On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 09:46 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> > Let's end the user/business days insanity this year and just have one 
> > GUADEC. Business/government/user talks can and should be scheduled 
> > during the "developer" days, and there is no reason not to have 
> > developer oriented sessions during the week.
>
> Depends on the angle for those talks. The kind we have had earlier years
> are 110% uninteresting for GNOME contributors so having them on
> 'developer days' is a waste of time and resources. Historically they
> also been a waste of time on the 'user day', but in this case we will
> not be doing a user day but instead just providing some talks to the IGC
> conference. So such talks might hit home with the IGC crowd, while we
> know by empirical evidence that there are no interest among 'GUADEC
> goers' in them.

I don't think that we should change the focus of GUADEC because we're
sharing a conference with a conference which isn't like GUADEC.

IGC was chosen primarily for 3 reasons - they were the only game in
town, they offer great infrastructure, and they have good community
support around Andalucia to bring GUADEC in. They are looking for street
cred, having one of the biggest free software conferences in Europe
alongside theirs. It's certainly, alongside akademy, the biggest free
desktop software conference in Europe.

What we should do is the opposite of what you're suggesting. Rather than
maintaining streams which have been a failure (in terms of attendance
and from the point of view of the presenters, who failed to reach their
target audience) is to decide what we want GUADEC to be for GNOME
community members, and how we want to attract new GNOME community
members, and then do that.

Now that we're on a public list, it would be interesting to hear
people's opinions on something.

There was a proposal to have GUADEC over 9 days (Saturday to Sunday),
with the facilities being at our disposition the bookend weekends, and
sharing with IGC during the week. I felt that this was too long, and
that many people (like myself) who have to take vacations to go to
GUADEC might stay away, or only come for the weekends.

There is also a proposal to have a week-long hackfest (see akademy for
an idea of what's involved) where each day people concentrate on a
different area of the desktop with presentations, brainstorming and hacking.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
David Neary
bolsh gimp org