Louis Suarez-Potts wrote:
It was supposed to be somehow a US version of OOoCon.
What could that possibly mean? Did you expect the same style of
conference given that it was a different venue with different people?
Consequently, the Community Council authorised going to the
DSL and money was made available by Team OpenOffice.org e.V., which
manages money for marketing events like this.
For simplicity, let's put money aside. First decide if it's worth going
to DLS again or if it's worth doing another RegiCon. If the answer is
yes, then we can think about how much we can afford to spend on it.
But what has resulted from the conference? For starters, it was not
what the CC envisioned.
What did the CC envision that failed to happen? I was in the CC and I
thoguht it went very well.
Yes it was fun for those attending.
Do you feel that team-building within the community is unimportant? For
an open source project, I think that this sort of interaction between
members is very important. After all, "fun" and "community" are the
primary motivators for almost any volunteer.
But what else? Did it get much press? If so, where? Did it bring in new
developers? Who? Key users? Which? Did it represent OOo in a strong
light? If so, by whose account?
I think now this is getting silly. Could you answer those same questions
about any other conference? Which new developers did we get from OOoCon?
Who? What about the MiniCon in Camberra?
Now, as far as I can tell, everyone who went to the conference feels
that it was worth doing and we should do it again. And naturally, those
are the people in the best position to judge the success of the conf.
If I recall correctly, we did have a few people doing fairly large
deployments. I didn't expect that I'd need to keep track of those for
later, so I don't have any details.
Another thing that came out of the RegiCon was a contact that led to the
NEA conference, where a lot of teachers learned about OOo for the first
time. And undoubtedly, the education sector is very important because
each teacher has the potential to influence at least 60 kids a year.
I believe that a couple of people went to both the RegiCon in San Diego
and the MiniCon in Camberra (Jean and Ian). Perhaps it'd be good for
them to give their opinions on how the two conferences compared. That
would give at least the people who went to Camberra a better idea of how
RegiCon went.
but we generally want a conference to be worth
the effort and money.
Why of course. So let's talk about effort and money:
1) Effort:
If the people putting in the effort would be volunteers who are
interested in the work, and cannot attend OOoCon due to distance. So, in
effect, there is zero loss in terms of effort.
2) Money:
A better way to ask the question is "how much money is TeamOOo willing
to commit to another DLS". The answer can be any decimal number between
$0 and "a lot".
(The press, or at least one key press member with influence, reported
that the poor booth presence and attendance there indicated that OOo
was losing its steam and membership base;
Do you feel that having a small presence at a conference will give us
worse publicity than having zero presence at a conference?
And if there are enough people willing to go to the DLS and manage it,
and if there is funding for it, and if it seems like it will be really
worth it, there is that.
Okay, so I guess we'll comission Ryan and Adam to find out the details
for the next DLS.
Cheers,
Daniel.
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