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Re: [Debconf-team] Re: DebConf "Legal" BoF continued - lets get it to a Delegation



(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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