There's been some talk going on recently about OSCamp on the planning
list. This message from Allison was particularly interesting, so I
thought I'd forward it on.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Allison Randal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: June 6, 2006 2:30:49 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: OSCamp space for Wed-Fri
Eric Wilhelm wrote:
# from Brandon C.S. Sanders
- We should be cautious about competing with the paid track ... I'd
like O'Reilly to love OSCAMP
- Prepared and pre-announced talks might compete?
OSCON isn't worried about competition. But keep in mind that you
need to offer something unique to draw people into OSCamp from
OSCON. In our marketing material we're promoting OSCamp as an
opportunity for all OSCON participants to join in the fun and talk
about whatever they want to talk about. That's your big selling point.
I suggest keeping the "open microphone" philosophy on all the days,
and starting fresh with an empty schedule each morning on Wed-Fri.
That way, when random people wander into the room on Wed after the
schedule is already full and get excited by the Open Space design,
you can tell them "no problem, come back in the morning and put
your session up for Thursday".
You'll get a lot of renewed energy from that. The OSCamp
participants on Thursday may be an entirely different group than
the participants on Monday. :)
- The exhibit hall booths are paid for by exhibitors ... if
it's
the sort of thing that might show up in an exhibit hall booth,
maybe it doesn't belong at OSCAMP?
If you're standing in a corner waiting for someone to walk by and
talk to you or buy t-shirts, then that is more of a booth. You'll
get more traffic in the exhibit hall anyway, so it makes sense to
go ahead and get a free non-profit booth for that kind of activity.
(There are a limited number of non-profit booths, because the
exhibit hall itself is only so big, but we could certainly swing a
"Portland OS User Groups" booth or something like that. And, many
of the projects involved already have their own non-profit booths.)
I think that's what OSCamp is all about. I don't speak for
O'Reilly, but I think their goal in supporting OSCamp is to
embrace the fringe/community stuff that Portland has to offer
(making OSCON more fun)...
Yes, yes, yes. :)
I'm thinking most of what you listed in the brainstorm falls under
these categories:
A. information for newbs
B. anecdotes
C. fun and games
D. free clinic
The beauty of the Open Space pattern is that it can accommodate any
kind of sessions people want to do. If you want to do a newbie
talk, do it. If you want to tell anecdotes or play games, do it.
Whatever people want to do they can do. And, if the audience gets
bored, they just wander to a different part of the room, or wait
out the hour for the next talk.
FOSCON does fall more in the category of "free talks because we
can't afford OSCON", but that's going to be offsite, after-hours,
and followed by pizza AFAICT.
We'd love to have FOSCON at the convention center. We really want
OSCON to be a benefit to the local communities. We want to show off
how active Portland is in the open source world. Sharing our space
is an easy way to do that. And, it makes logistics easier for the
organizers of FOSCON, PHPCamp, etc, because speakers like Matz and
Rasmus will already be staying close to the convention center.
Allison
_______________________________________________
PDXRuby mailing list
[email protected]
IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net
http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
