Re: [Debconf-team] Planning for the schedule
2009/3/31 Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers@debian.org>:
> I am expecting to do the schedule of talks for this year's Debconf. As
> such, since this is my first time doing this for Debconf, I have a few
> questions. In conferences I have helped to organise in the past, this
> process needed a lot more input than just the list of talks. So this
> mail is meant to start the ball rolling gathering them up.
As you might have noticed you will be not really alone to do this task.
I'm really happy that you are grabbing up the hat, but as Vanessa an
me said (probably I have broken the thread in this mailing list) the
scheduling team from last years DebConf is up and running for this
year as well. I'm happy that you intend to join which makes things
more relaxed.
> First and foremost, I will need some idea of what talk rooms we will
> have, what their capacities are, when they are available, and perhaps
> most importantly, which rooms the video team will be able to cover (if
> it's not all of them).
This is an important question but I guess the answer will need some
time. As I understand things we really want to cover all official talks
with video. Please be aware that if you are at DebConf several new
ideas pop up and people register sometimes BoFs quoite spontaneous.
We tried not to block these ideas and scheduling needs some flexibility -
but this is not huaranteed to be covered by the video team. My suggestion
would be to reserve either a room or a time slot every day for such
cases.
> Also, since we do want to video as much as possible, I will need input
> from the video team about how long they need between talks to faff, once
> the list of talks has been finalised, which of the talks any members of
> the team refuse to miss, etc.
I think using a one hour time slot per event as we did on previous
DebConfs is fine. This makes 45min talking time + 10min discussion +
5min break. I learned at DebConf that longer time slots are a problem
for the video team because it includes switching tapes.
> Naturally, we tend to have keynotes, those need to be identified to me
> clearly.
This was the case last year - I expect it to be the same this year.
My suggestion to make a keynote NOT the first talk of a day was
not regarded and it turned out that if the keynote is in the early morning
the attendance is not very high. So please do not do the same failure
this year.
> Also, if we have any statistics on which times of day are
> good/bad and how well people attended talks in previous Debconfs.
Yes, we have: The first slots are not very well attended. Once the
talks are evaluated you get some rankings of the talks. When I made
my first scetch for the schedule I worked with the following algorithm:
Start with the 5 highest ranked talks and schedule these in the middle
of the day. Take the next 5 and put these before the schedule times,
take rankings 10-15 and fill the slots after the first ones and so on
The intention was to concentrate most attractive talks in the middle
of the day. Scheduling in Argentina was easy because we had basically
one main talk room. I expect more talks this year and so we have to
adapt this idea to more locations.
I tried also to assemble talks which seem to be covering a similar
field on one day.
> If anyone else has any domain-specific knowledge about scheduling for
> Debconfs, or any other requirements they need to feed into the
> scheduling process, please do let me know.
As a general note I learned that my German schedule which is basically
"start early - use daylight to work" does not fit and we had to shift my
my first plan by one hour. (BTW, this left us some space in Penta. Penta
has a bug^Wfeature that the first hour you start scheduling is the
"start of the day". It is not possible to place an earlier event this day -
we tried to schedule some sports events which ended up in the schedule
of th eday before. So I'd suggest to register either a dummy event per
day or just a real running event each day which should be placed at
0:00. We can adapt this later.)
So adapting to a "local" schedule makes perfectly sense and I would
ask our locals when the first events on a day should happen. I will
insist on a long empty slot which is called "siesta" and which will
most probably make sense. (I think no talks inbetween 13:00 and 16:00
might make sense.) Considering that people will be relaxed after this
time scheduling keynotes after siesta would be my prefered strategy.
To compensate the long break in the middle I would run talks until
midnight and the last talk of each day could be kind of a "fun talk"
as we had seen from Bdale about his rocket hobby and I also registered
a talk about taking photos when beeing on Free Software events.
Hope this helps
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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