Hello,
madduck asked me to comment on the recent thread, and I just went
through old list messages and IRC logs. Here's what I think:
- I'd like to make it explicit that Debcamp is mainly for work, but I
wouldn't ask people to fill in bureaucracy before joining. I think
that the most hard working people would be the ones with more
difficulty in filling a work plan in advance. I myself cannot
predict what I'm going to do at debcamp, as I'll mostly do things
depending on who's around to do things with.
- I'd like to encourage doing work through facilitation instead. Last
year I improvised some Skill Exchange sessions[1] that were quite
useful in putting people into a working mood. More facilitation can
be planned. Little brainstorming:
- a large whiteboard where people write who is working on what and
where, and everyone can see it just by entering the hacklab
- a screen to visualise the upload queue from the camp, as was
suggested earlier. And maybe, also the relevant changelog
entries. Even alioth svn/git/* commits done from the camp is
something that would be cool to have on a screen somewhere, or
even all of this can be projected on a wall.
- a list of packages maintained by people currently present at the
camp (autogenerated from the participant database?)
- a list of people present at the camp who are part of a team and
can speak for the team; or a list of what people present on the
camp are normally involved with, or what pieces of infrastructure
they maintain.
- a list of what people have just made and would like other people
to test
I think that the main thing to avoid is to have a lab full of people who
chat on IRC because they still haven't thought of something fun to work
on, or found someone interesting to work with.
Another thing I'd like to avoid (through facilitation) is people doing
useful work, but alone: that could be done just as well from home. The
point of Debcamp is physycal proximity, and that must be exploited as
much as possible. People should be in a position to easily choose,
among the different things they could do, those that they can do
together with others at the camp.
[1]
http://www.mail-archive.com/debconf-announce@lists.debconf.org/msg00059.html
http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebCampSkillsExchange
Ciao,
Enrico
--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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