On Thu, 2009-04-02 at 09:56 +0200, Andreas Tille wrote: > 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. Who was part of that team? I was under the impression that noone had spoken up about this which is why I originally volunteered. > > 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. Right, so having slots nominally allocated to "spontaneously erupting talk/BOF" is needed :-) > > 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. Some talks naturally take less time, some take more. I wonder if we should schedule on 30m granularity with the expectation that talks tend to take two 30m slots. Something to ponder, anyhow. > > 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. Certainly. I think keynotes should be scheduled at a sensible time, however at least one is likely to be the "welcome to debconf" talk which probably ought to be scheduled as the first talk on the first day, but perhaps not in the first timeslot (iyswim) > > 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. Are first slots not attended well, or is it early-in-the-day is not attended well. If we made the first talk slot be at 11am, would it be poorly attended? > I tried also to assemble talks which seem to be covering a similar > field on one day. This makes sense, although obviously not all at the same time :-) > 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.) This sounds useful to know. > 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. Putting keynotes that late in the day risks people having found "something more interesting to do" (where that might be eating more dinner already) -- We need to know what the local team think in terms of snack breaks etc. In Brazil the hotel provided coffee, tea, fruit and cake at various points during the day which would be something to schedule around. > 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. Hmm, I think midnight is a little enthusiastic. I wouldn't run official talks after "dinner" since people will tend to want the evenings to do their own hacking etc. I'd imagine, given we'll be in the middle of spain in summer, that something like: first slot starts 09:30, on the first day, first talk at 10:00 talks run from 09:30 to 13:00 Lunch and siesta from 13:00 to 16:00 talks run from 16:00 to 20:00 dinner at 20:00 Obviously that is dependent on what the local catering wants for lunch and dinner in terms of times, but it would give us seven and a half hours of talk time per day. Any comments anyone? D. -- Daniel Silverstone http://www.debian.org/ PGP mail accepted and encouraged. Key Id: 2BC8 4016 2068 7895
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