On Monday 30 May 2011 14:01:02 Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hey,
On 28.05.2011 12:38, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
let's put our new list to good use! We need to find 4 keynote speakers for the conference. Below some suggestions
[...]
Comments?
If we would do a general tech conference I would love to see most of them. The thing is we don't. Or are we? I always took the openSUSE Conference as the "general Meeting" of the openSUSE Project so I would look for keynotes that have some sort of relation to openSUSE. At the first conference we neglected this and although most of the speakers where high profile and the keynotes where nice they haven't had any effect on the conference or the project. Last year we had Frank, Gerald, Vincent and Me giving keynotes and each of them had very high impact on the people that gathered for our conference. So to make a long story short: My number one prio would be that keynotes need to have an effect on the conference and the project.
Now I might have an idea for something like this and would love feedback. At LinuxTag I talked to Lenz and we played with an Idea for a keynote for the conference. By now we have such a nice mixture of oldtimers and newcomers in the project that we could do a nice campfire bonding session with the grandpas to establishing identity. Sort of a war stories panel if you get what I mean :) Everybody loves war stories and we do have many great ones. We also played with names that night and here is who we could ask to attend and who would be fun to listen to about the good ol' days:
* Lenz Grimmer (nowadays mysql) * Bodo Bauer (nowadays Elektrobit) * Dirk Hohndel (nowadays Intel) * Adrian Schröter * Hubert Mantel
And there might be many many more that could share funny stuff from back then in the audience. I would love to organize something like this as keynote and maybe "moderate". What do you think?
Sounds surely fun and interesting. Yes, you have a point - having keynotes be about what WE do, our community. And stories are important for a community - they are what builds up a shared identity. So, I'm all for this. But an external keynote can also be nice, motivate people to look beyond their borders, etc So I'd say we need a mix. We could ask Michael Miller to keynote, I understand he's a good speaker. Would/could be interesting. And a well known community member. And an external person. And this forum. That would be 4 ;-)
Henne