On 04/05/2012 12:33 PM, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:
On Thu, 2012-04-05 at 18:00 +0200, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
On Thursday 05 April 2012 17:27:34 jdd wrote:
Le 05/04/2012 16:54, Jos Poortvliet a écrit :
Problem is that we are pressed for time.
ok
So if you have an opinion on the theme of oSC 2012 (and you should if you're on this list and help organize it, it is YOUR conference) - say something until then!
I don't know if it's what you wait for :-), but what I can say is the following:
I was a gamer. I played with my childs warcraft, starcraft, and so on, including online games. I also played Monkey Island or Day of the tentacle, old timers knows them :-).
But since I'm involved in openSUSE (that is nearly from the beginning), I have no more time to play nor desire to do so. I play a real life game. I build packages and a ditribution, then a project. I play with other players that are real people, with real needs. I face real problems and solve them with the other project members help.
It's a virtual entreprise that is not virtual. May be. Virtual because my income do not rely on it - I do all this for the fun, not for the money. Hey it even cost me money (but less than the games :-). Real because sales are realworld sales - sales for free, but with real accounts, goals and people if not me that live from them.
So, YES, openSUSE is FUN, much FUN!
Have fun, boys and girls!
Ok, so you say for you this theme works...
So we just buy lots of beer and have a big party? I doubt that'll work for potential sponsors or some other folks.
Look, we have to decide what the conference should FEEL like. Last year we wanted lots of BOF's and a DO IT culture, so the artwork and posters said that, the talks were focussed on that etcetera. Now, what theme do we want? Fun is a possibility, that's what I'm saying - but there are other things possible.
I like the way JDD phrased that. In fact, I see his words as a perfect script for a video montage promoting the event.
So, beyond just "Fun", we do invest in these conferences for a reason. Not just to party, but to have an outcome, hopefully something specific. The first year didn't really have a theme, iirc, but second year we said "Collaboration across borders" and third year, we said "RWX" and Just Do It.
So, on a more indepth level, we have to ask who is our target audience and who do we feel will create the $outcome we desire? And what is it we want to "get done" at this conference?
I'm almost tempted to come up with the slogan "Getting things done!"
I like the "Getting things done!" idea. Then again, Jos has already stated that he will make the decision, thus this might not matter. ;)
and try to blend the past years into a both more collaborative and more discussion type event. Cut down even further on the number of read-ony presentations and give higher priority to longer BoFs.
A quick 45-minute BoF doesn't really achieve much in the way of "getting things done" if we're moving on to the next BoF and then the one after that. Making our BoFs more hack-ish would help. I had a hard time recalling all the facts and discussions to sum up after conference was over, and the particular nature of our BoFs really were "talk now, do it after conference" style.
So a session, let's say 1 1/2 hours long, where first half is spent on discussing things, and then second half focused on doing it.
I would not go with the 1 1/2 hour sessions as a general format for the following reasons: - at first people will be scared off by the length of time, some of those scared off will not take a second look to understand the "true" format, therefore we will loose a certain percentage of speakers - people that get the format of present, discuss ideas, hack will still have an issue with the length of time. It is difficult to find a topic to keep going for 90 minutes and we would risk of having a lot of idle time. My suggestion would be to have some 90 minute sessions in all tracks, but generally keep sessions to 45 minutes.
I guess instead of calling it BoF, we'd call it HoF (Hackers of a Feather). :-)
Conclude the conference with a lightning-talk style overview of all the things we HoF'ed, highlighting what we've now completed and collectively discuss what we need to do next Project-wide.
If we want just a hack fest that's fine, but then we should call it that. However, this would clearly segregate people as techies will go to the techie hack sessions, marketing folks will do their thing, etc. In a more traditional setup you will get people from all areas in some sessions, thus it is more friendly to the overall community, rather than splitting the community into smaller pieces.
And this can still include inviting other projects to join in on collaborative hackings that are mutually beneficial.
I think this would also be a community-growth effect because some people attend conferences but are in sort of "lurker-mode."
We can argue about this. IMHO just focusing on hacking activities does not encourage cross-pollination. In the end we "work" on oure islands all year, techies use the tech lists and marketing folks use their lists, etc. Once a year we get together, we should be focused on providing offerings that do not separate the community. Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-conference+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-conference+owner@opensuse.org