Aloha! On Fri, 2010-04-16 at 16:33 +0200, Michael Loeffler wrote:
Moin,
first refresh your mind and/or get inspired of the openSUSE conference 2009 [1].
Day 1 videos are now edited and up for viewing pleasure :-)
And then let's have some starting conversation about openSUSE conference 2010. Most important for the start is a place and a date. As place we think Nürnberg, Germany is a good fit as it is good to reach from where ever you're coming from and its a convenient place to attract as many SUSE/Novell developers as possible. For the venue we're aiming for the same venue we had last year - Berufsförderungswerk Nürnberg [2] - which is perfect from a conference perspective and has 75 hotel rooms on-site with a reasonable price. Downside was internet connectivity (2Mbit) but they meanwhile can offer 4Mbit and work on getting 10Mbit till mid of this year. So, with some luck this downside should be solved till the conference takes place.
Berufsförderungswerk Nürnberg worked pretty well I think, even if the net connection wasn't the best. So I'm happy to see this as the venue.
From a timing perspective we currently have two options for the openSUSE conference: a) week of Sept 6-12 b) week of Oct 18 - 24
I strongly vote for the latter variant b) as in Southern Germany its not just still vacation season, it's still school vacation till Sept 13th or so which means pretty many people are on vacation in reality. Further, most of the preparation work would fall into the globally vacation season which might not be perfect.
I would definitely vote for b). Not only does it mean that travel will be easier as vacations are over, but crucially it gives us an extra month for planning/prep etc.
Last year we had a 4 days conference [3] from Thursday through Sunday which imo was the right duration. My question would be if it should shift days, eg. from Wednesday through Saturday ?
I agree the length was good, I am however unable to answer the day shift question. I'm not sure it makes much of a difference, so I'm not fussed either way :-)
For the conference in general I propose to create a team which takes care of everything such as key notes, major topics, content in general, sponsoring, special events, PR, advertising etc..
Ah the openSUSE Conference Coordination Committee (oSC-CC). Good idea, but we need to put a call out to get volunteers to help out. I'm not sure there is the knowledge/experience in any one team. Out of interest is there a school/college/university in or near Nürnberg that deals with Media? Reason I ask is maybe it would be better if we could get them to do the filming/editing of the conference, and maybe other media related items? Just a thought.
What about doing a openSUSE conference 2010 kick-off meeting next week on Thursday 22, 6pm CEST [4] on openSUSE-project IRC channel?
OK I've pencilled that into my hugely busy diary.
Looking forward having an effective conference organization and to see you all at openSUSE conference 2010.
Best M
[1] http://gallery.opensuse.org/Conference%2009/ [2] http://www.bfw-nuernberg.de/admin.tool/_cms/de/Content/na/na/19,0.html [3] http://en.opensuse.org/Conference_2009 [4] http://tinyurl.com/y289c3c --
Regards, Andy -- Andrew Wafaa, openSUSE Member: FunkyPenguin. PGP: 0x3A36312F openSUSE: Get It, Discover It, Create It at http://www.opensuse.org