Hi, a few comments. I don't have a strong opinion on the two vs. three core days. My guess is that two days could work for GUADEC as it has happened in the last couple of years. For the workshops my suggestion is to either market them more aggressively to third parties. They will be poorly visited this year, so my guess is that the experiment in the current form didn't quite work. Personally I placed them on the day before so that: * Attendees wouldn't be blocked from BoFs * Newcomers have it as a way to be introduced to the community Remember that the workshops as we do them this year are training sessions. Structuring the BoF days a bit more might work and we could even try some stuff this year, if anyone is up to organize it. There is a lecture hall very close by which the department may open for us. It doesn't feel to me like it will make a large difference for long term community members though because the sessions are too independent of each other. With regard to length, it really doesn't make much of a difference from an organizational point of view. Most tasks require a fixed effort which is exactly the same whether it is only a single day or four days. I can see that it saves money for rentals/accommodation, at the same time if there are proper hacking sessions then the cost to fly people in drops in relation to the work that will happen. In general, I would suggest co-hosting or co-locating GUADEC with another conference of a similar size (either Akademy or anything else really). This would give both conferences a larger visibility and would probably attract more attendees who wouldn't come to either event. And a wider audience of attendees/speakers means new ideas coming into the GNOME community. My guess it is too late for this for GUADEC 2017, but personally I would love to see a Desktop Summit again or co-locating with e.g. GStreamer, systemd.conf, or anything else really. Benjamin On Di, 2016-07-26 at 10:04 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
Hi all, Yes, you heard me right: 2017. :) The location of next year's conference has yet to be officially decided, but with only one bid on the table and a requirement to book the venue soon, we are being forced into some forward planning. Last November there was an interesting discussion about the length of GUADEC [1]. I would like to pick that up again and make a tentative proposal for GUADEC 2017. This is as follows: - Switch to two days of talks and two days of "hack days". - Advertise the conference as a four day event. The fact that the first two days are talks would be a minor footnote only; when people say they want to come, we give them the dates for the four days. - Maximize the inclusiveness and activity of the hack days. There are lots of possibilities here, including: - Holding the workshops during the hack days rather than the day before the conference. - Making sure that there's space for people to hack and talk. - Having some kind of led session on the morning of the first hack day, which will help people to form groups to work on the same things. - Having a space where people can do impromptu lighting talks. - Setting up areas for particular kinds of activity, like an "apps zone" or an "engagement zone". - Providing spaces where people can hold meetings and BoFs without needing to book or plan them in advance. - Having wrap-up sessions at the end of each day, where groups can feed back what they have done that day. The key goals/advantages of this proposal are: - Maximise interaction between attendees: give them more time to talk and hold discussions. - Be more inclusive. One of the problems of the current format is that there's a lot of ambiguity: there are two sets of dates, newcomers don't really know whether the BoF days are for them, or how to get involved. A primary goal therefore is to encourage people to stay for the full event and to provide opportunities for them to fully participate throughout. - Get more stuff done, and give the conference more of a hackfest feel. - Reduce costs, reduce stress. Fewer days would place less of a demand on the local team. It would also reduce the cost of venue hire. The main disadvantage of this approach is that it gives less time for talks. After the discussion last time around, I'm confident that we could have around 22 talks. However, we'd lose at least one keynote and we'd lose the lightning talks (we'd keen the interns lightning talks). There are possibilities for juggling things a little, of course: we could lose all the keynotes and reinstate the lightning talks, or we could introduce a mixture of short and long talk slots. Any thoughts or opinions? We might not have long to book the venue (following the Board's final decision about where the conference will be held), so it would be good to have reactions sooner rather than later. Thanks, Allan [1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/guadec-list/2015-November/msg0000 1.html _______________________________________________ guadec-list mailing list guadec-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/guadec-list
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