Re: GNOME events in Beijing

["Quim Gil" <qgil gnome org>]

Hi Emily,

On 8/3/07, Emily chen <Emily Chen sun com> wrote:

>  Now I have a basic idea of what's future Beijing Gnome Events like: It is
> not as big as Guadec, focus on East Asia, about 100~ 200 people, last for
> 2~3days. The best place is university or research institute. The register
> fee is free. The aim is get local Gnome developers and users together.
> Sounds a good start.

It sounds good indeed.

>  1. How to contact potential sponsors? Who will do this job, in the name of
> Gnome community ?

>From the GNOME Foundation we can help contacting the advisory board
companies. I'd say most of the funds in cash could come from here.
Then you would need to find the local sponsors (in cash or in kind
i.e. the provider of the venue and equipment). The evaluation about
how to approach the public / institutional / government support should
probably come totally from your side, I don't think we would be of
much help here.

What is important is to prepare a good budget to see how much money
needs to be fundraised to have something from sustainable to great.

>  2. Who is the official organizer?

We can discuss this. I personally wouldn't mind having the GNOME
Foundation as organizer with a local committee formed by the people
you decide.

>  3. What kind of help we can get from Gnome community? Besides the web page
> server.

A quick answer would be: what kind of help do you need? Some local
groups are organizing events almost autonomously and they request from
the GNOME Foundation some funding to i.e. get some t-shirts or invite
an international speaker. We could do something similar for Beijing,
but something tells me that we could find a higher level of
collaboration and compromise, trying to start building a GUADEC-like
event for East Asia.

We are open for ideas.


>  We (Sun JDS team) can not do all the things, but we are willing to help and
> coordinate. The support from Gnome community is important.
>  I cc: Sun China JDS manager Paul Mei and team lead Harry for more
> discussion.

I told you already in Birmingham that I saw the people at Sun JDS as a
good seed of this organization team, but of course not the only ones
to be at the front of this initiative.

We can make a call for contributors through Planet GNOME and the
advisory board mailing list (since many companies have GNOME-related
presence in Beijing or the area).

3-5 people with some dedication and distributed responsiblities at the
beginning is probably enough. Then for the event depends on the size
and complexity, but 10-15 volunteers are probably also enough (the
more volunteers the more you will be able to enjoy the conference you
have organized).


>  LinuxWorld has been hosted in China every year since 2000. This year will
> opened at September 7-8th in Beijing.
>  http://linux.chinaunix.net/linuxworld/english/index.shtml
>  I guess it is similar like FOSS.IN. Maybe cooperate with LinuxWorld and add
> some Gnome session or Gnome day is possible.

Would be a possibility. Sometimes it is difficult to marry two
partners with different attitudes and interests, though. For the
LinuxWorld events I have seen in Europe I think it would be difficult
to combine them with an event with pure GNOME community spirit, but I
have no idea how LinuxWorld is in China (nor I know how the "pure
GNOME community spirit" will be in China/Asia either).   :)

Asfar as I know LinuxWorld targets to businesses and gives some blinks
to open source community activity... since they (we) are a good asset
for their quite corporate conferences. By default I would think that
it's better to find a neutral host in a university or similar and
target directly to the audience of developers and power users that
would be interested in a casual and inspiring GNOME event but not
necessarely in a LinuxWorld type of conference.



>  Set up a team of collaborators is really a good idea. My understand for the
> collaborators team is like someone from Sun, someone from university open
> source community, someone from Novell, or Google or Nokia, someone from
> Gnome community.

At the end it doesn't matter where the people come from as far as they
want to give a hand and get compromised because they have a personal
interest. The more you get of these the better.

Yes, what is good in trying to get one person from each company is
that these people get officially some kind of responsibility (and
hopefully time) to work on the organization.

What is key is to have involved someone from  the host organization
(the university or wherever you organize the event). If you get
someone working in the venue that is interested in the conference and
shares with you the will to make it happen successfully you will gain
a lot. If instead you get a contact person with a bureaucratic
approach that looks at you as "a client" only then you will need to
fight much more for every single detail.

I'm going to blog and email the advisory board members right now.

-- 
Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org