2011/12/14 Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me:
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com
wrote:
Over the years, GNOME community events have grown in frequency, size
and the expectations of hosting professional quality events. It is a
challenge for a volunteer community to keep up with consistently year
after year. Currently, events tend to be planned in isolation and
there is too much reinventing of wheels. GUADEC planning, for example,
tends to mostly be done by the team who won the bid, and their ability
to put together a good event does vary quite a bit from year to year.
Fortunately, the 2012 GUADEC Planning team does seem to be in good
shape, so this is one upcoming event that I am not so concerned about.
So, speaking as someone who was part of an organizing committee for
Plumbers. Linux foundation knows how to do conferences, and do them
professionally. How about co-location with a Linux Foundation conference?
For instance, having Plumbers conference with a desktop conference would be
quite interesting I think considering the direction we are moving towards.
A vertical platform, this might be more interesting.
Something else to consider when thinking about Boston Summit.
That said, I do think that the last Desktop Summit event suffered from
a general lack of participation on the GNOME side of things. When we
were unable to find a sponsor for GNOME social events, alternatives
were not organized, for example. GNOME was unable to find resources to
help with infrastructure issues, such as identify management or helping
to setup a registration system (a longstanding problem we seem to have
year after year). More seriously, a event like the Desktop Summit
should inspire collaborative work and there did not seem to be enough
effort in terms of planning concrete collaborative activities. If we
are to hold Desktop Summits in the future, I think we need to focus
more energy in these areas to make them successful.
There are several things that we can learn from Linux Foundation on how to
run conferences.
My overall feeling is that we're moving towards a platform based end state
that doesn't really mix that well with other desktop projects. I think
there are definitely some cross work at the lower layers that we can work on
but it seems that there should be a freedesktop.org conference or some
such, not a GNOME/KDE. Shouldn't those folks step up and do something like
that?
My two cents.
sri
Freedesktop.org doesn't have the same organizational structures that
gnome and kde have. It isn't so much a community as a set of servers,
admins and developers. It is more of a meeting place on the interwebs
than an organization - an official DMZ for the various desktop
communities. They don't have the structure to actually run a
conference but it might be worth exploring having a conference under
the fd.o banner where the conference is run much like we run the
Desktop Summit but doesn't cannibalize our respective flagship
conferences. The issue though is getting sponsorship to get the right
people there and make it successful. I don't know if there will be
support from companies for yet another conference. One of the
advantages cited by companies for the Desktop Summit is that they
don't have to send their employees to two different conferences though
I think that is short sighted as less tends to get done at these
larger events.
--
J5
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