(No need to Cc leader@, I'm on the list, and this is more a discussion than a formal request of any sort atm, aiui.) On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 05:56:01PM +0200, Andreas Schuldei wrote: > > 1) travel sponsorship seems very obscure; [...] > Branden did not get any money because he specified that he could > do with anything between 0 and 500USD. The goal is usually to not > pay people who can actually afford the trip on their own. Right, the problem is that in this case (aiui) it resulted in him not being able to attend. That might mean you're not communicating with potential attendees very well: maybe it needs to be made clearer that the question isn't "how much would you like?" (lots!!) but "what's the minimum amount of support you need in order to get to debconf" Maybe an alternative would be to have fields like: What's your expected flight cost [________] The orga team estimate accommodation costs to be $y / day The orga team estimate food costs to be $x / day [x] I won't be able to attend debconf unless I get sponsorship for: _____ % of my travel costs [ ] accommodation [ ] food > Travel sponsorship has a devided purpose: > 1) support people who would not be able to come otherwise, to > enable them to participate. > 2) be a way for debian to say "thank you" to peopel who > accomplished outstanding things in the past for debian. Hrm. I would have thought "make sure the other attendees have the benefit of having _foo_ at the conference -- because of their knowledge, or the talk they'll present, or whatever" would have been up there. > > 3) the distance between the hacklab and the lecture rooms we've had > > the past couple of years has been really bad to the point where it's > > discouraged people from going to talks > can you be more specific at which location it was very bad, very > good or just great? Oslo was fine, Helsinki and Oaxtepec were difficult. > Others raised this point too, and i disagree. It bothers me slightly that you don't list the benefits you see in having them separated so that people can suggest other ways of getting those benefits that don't have the same drawbacks. > > 4) it's not entirely clear what the point of the conference is, there > > are more than a few possibilities: > > -- educate people with talks > > -- provide an opportunity for DDs to get together and hack on stuff > > -- give people a chance to meet face to face, socialise, > > reduce aggression and brainstorm new ideas > > -- provide an excuse to have some fun rather than just hack and flame > > each other > > -- prove Debian is just as cool as Ubuntu because we can > > have expensive conferences too > The point of the conference is to inspire people about debian. Which people? Do you mean inspiring people to use Debian? Inspiring people who haven't contributed before to start? Inspiring people who already contribute to do more? Inspiring people who've stopped to start again? Inspiring people to look at different aspects of Debian and work on them instead? How about the people who are already inspired to work on Debian and are doing as much as they can -- eg the release managers or the orga team itself? Do the other orga team people share that view of the point of the conference? > it > is geared towards motivating them for an other year to work on > debian and to set them on fire for our cause. If that's the case, then I wonder how successful dc6 was at that goal -- there were a whole bunch of talks on Ubuntu, eg, which doesn't seem ideally focussed on inspiring people to work on Debian, and mostly seemed about challenging Debian to do better. I didn't go to all the talks by any measure; but the only one I'd say was clearly in the "look how cool everything is" inspirational category was the large CDD-installations one. > They should be thrilled about the breadth and width of it, Not everyone thinks that way; other people get annoyed at the focus on derivatives, or legal issues, or social issues, when what inspires them about Debian is Debian itself, or the technical issues. > and if they enjoy so, learn new > details about things they know. (This is btw my main issue with > Manoj's "vote on everything!" since I dont expect a result that > would be more inspiring then what we have now.) The difference is that the result would probably be more inspiring to /Manoj/. And then, another aspect is that the sheer process of voting on things is inspiring to some, and I'd be surprised if the author of devotee isn't one of those people. ;) > > 5) There doesn't seem to be a lot of feedback from the participants and > > speakers to the next year's organisers; which is especially a problem > > if the lead organisers stay the same each year. > that is not really true. For instance, getting some feedback from an attendee, and replying to it with "that is not really true" doesn't encourage feedback. :) > we listen to people and improve > the conference successivly. we started to have evaluation > questionairs since debconf3 in oslo and i have been pushing > people to integrate them into the conference management system > and webinterface. I also asked for help from people who are good > at questionairs and statistics to produce more meaningfull and > relevant questions and evaluations. For lca, I don't think we've ever gotten any value out of questionnaires; I /think/ having next year's team ask for comments has had some value, but I'm not sure even that has worked amazingly well. OTOH, we do have the advantage that the organisers for next year -- that make all the decisions on what to do -- were just attendees previously, which does help us. The idea probably isn't to focus on what went wrong, but on what cool new things can be done next year -- the day trip is a great idea, and the debcamp preceeding debconf is a great idea, but they've been done, so what's the next great idea? Putting paper selection in the hands of the attendees? Getting lots more people to go? Something else? > > I'm also not sure why debconf remains free for all comers; > we dont try to encourage everyone and her dog to come. Really? I thought that was at least the theory behind "Debian Day"? [charging for attendence] > yes, that would be a totally differnet conference and i think > also a pretty differnet set of attendees. Here i am interested in > whom we would loose and who would come, additionally. Well, every year should be a different conference, really; the important thing is what sort of conference it is. If you want to keep it a small, focussed, technical conference that's great -- it's then just a matter of doing that as well as possible. One of the most inspiring things at LCA this year for me was going to see a talk by Van Jacobson (as in -the- Van Jacobson) about optimising the kernel level implementation of networking from the ethernet driver to cope with 100Gbps networking -- it was /highly/ technical, approached it with a broad analysis (ending up going from a specific kernel driver all the way to userspace), had both low level details (why doubly linked lists are bad) and high level principles (why end-to-end processing is fundamentally more efficient), covered lots of historical detail, and was even immediately relevant to the software I use every day. It also didn't have anything to do with me personally -- I'm not a kernel guy, or even a glibc guy, so it wasn't remotely "this is something you should do better in the future, aj", it was just "here's some cool stuff I did, and look how fun it was, doesn't it make you want to go do fun stuff too?" Cheers, aj
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