On Wednesday 18 December 2013 00:47:25 Dimstar / Dominique Leuenberger wrote:
On Mon, 2013-12-16 at 14:13 +0100, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
Kolab is, games are not. Anything in between will be up to whoever volunteers for the CfP. I'd suggest getting somebody from the business side involved - I bet Hans de Raadt would be more than willing to have a look at talk proposals.
That's a bald statement: what if STEAM as a company would be presenting 'steam'? sounds very much like it belongs into the business track.
True, if there would of course be an audience of game developers - if it is presenting for users, it would not be for a business track, if you ask me. The name should probably be more like 'b2b' track, a track where (people from) companies can talk together about technologies, share success stories and do's and don'ts, learn from each other, perhaps form business relationships ('networking'), stuff like that. That they would advertise their stuff is good in as far as the listeners are interested in that. So Steam talking to game developers about their platform - fine for a business track. Steam talking about how awesome their games are for users wouldn't fit in the track.
As you state: the difference is not so much black and white.
Yeah, it's vague. I hope my explanation above helps. More below :D
It's more likely about the intent of the company / presenter: the typical business track is about promoting 'the own business and products', on a fine line between a boring sales pitch and actually presenting what the company CAN do and DOES DO for the open source eco system.
Yes, and as I noted - I think it should be interesting for other business. That's why I suggested to have business folk help decide what is interesting. And for Free and Open Source Software, small and medium businesses doing 'things' with FOSS are the most interesting group of course. We'd give them a place to talk about stuff, hopefully strengthening the openSUSE-FOSS ecosystem - which could of course benefit us as they might do big deployments (get us users) or even contribute in various ways (like Hans de Raad or B1 do). So, to make it as concrete as I can: the business track is to let B1, DevHdR and Kolabsys talk to each other AND find and attrackt new B1's, Kolabsys'es and DevHdR's. Of course they could 'just' be part of the normal tracks, but especially the 'attraction' part works better if we can advertise a 'special' business track on a day that fits business working hours (hint: not a Sunday). Now, the question is: does anybody have a strong argument as to why we should NOT do that? Because if not, I think Svebor, as organizer of the event, can and should go and do what he thinks is best. Hugs, Jos
Dominique