Hi, On Do, 2015-11-05 at 19:03 +0000, Allan Day wrote:
Huge thanks to the team that are putting on GUADEC this year. It's fantastic that you've stepped up, and Karlsruhe looks like a cool city! I've been involved in the papers committee for a fair few years now, and I've been involved in doing hte conference schedule for at least the past 3/4 years. I was interested to see that your bid proposes only having two core days for GUADEC next year.
The reason for this proposal is that this was suggested to us at GUADEC this year (I am not exactly sure who suggested it). This matches what Dave said in his reply.
Until 2014, GUADEC had 4 core days. Then, this year, we switched to 3 days. This was a bit of a challenge for the schedule: we just managed to squeeze everything in, but only just.
GUADEC as a conference has been shrinking quite a bit in the last years (have a look at https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/HowTo/EstimateAttendees). And I would say that the conference has changed quite a lot and is much more community driven at this point. But I find it hard to qualify what exactly changed and what the cause/effect here is. Yes, if we are going down to two days we will need to cut down on the number of talk slots and reject more talks. The potential benefit is a higher average quality of the talks at GUADEC.
If we want to go down to two core days, we'll probably have to radically rethink the schedule. Possibilities might involve cutting the lightning talks, and/or cutting the length of the talks. It seems like a good idea to talk about this early on. I'll also say that I'm a little hesitant about cutting down the length of the core days from a social point of view, and that it would be a big change from the 4 day conference we were holding until just last year. That's not to say that there might not be advantages to the change, but it probably deserves some discussion.
The issue of having fewer social events and less time for general conversations is a real one, and I actually consider this the main argument to stick with three days right now. Maybe the best way forward would be to create some mock schedules of how a two day event might look like. Then the paper committee can comment on whether they think the amount of slots would be reasonable assuming a similar pool of submissions as last year. An alternative would be actively work on increasing the scope of GUADEC. It appears to me that the free software community is more scattered these days as there are more projects with events of their own. Also, other areas (web, containers, …) are receiving much more (corporate) attention than the desktop. Alexandre already mentioned Elementary and Cinnamon. Do people agree that we would like to invite representatives from other desktop environments that use GNOME technology to GUADEC? Anyone up to contacting them? Benjamin
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