Hi, On Dienstag, 31. März 2009, Daniel Silverstone wrote: > [...] 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. Indeed. Thanks for the ball :) > 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). As I remember the venue there are three rooms available: a big one (200-300 people), a smaller one (100 people?) and a bof-room (60 people or so, but with stairs and a sound-system with a mic for every seat). Cesar will probably correct me here or add more info. Basically, we havent decided yet. > Naturally, we tend to have keynotes, those need to be identified to me > clearly. Point. I assume you will have to remind us of that :) Eg, we need to come up with a criteria what will be a keynote.. :) On Donnerstag, 2. April 2009, Andreas Tille wrote: > 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. Ad hoc scheduling not only causes stress for the video team, but also for the organizers (for example, last year we had an important team meeting planned and then suddenly the openssl talk was scheduled at that time and our meeting didnt take place properly, which led to quite some problems...) and the participants too. So please, just DONT DO this. It's ok to schedule something 48h in advance, but I'd really not schedule anything with less than 24h warning, better 48h. It's also perfectly ok to do an ad hoc BoF - just dont schedule it please. And make no exceptions. That way, people will be more likely to schedule things with a proper warning and all will be happier :-) (Of course said openssl-event was also stressful for the videoteam. Despite being told by the schedulers that we dont have to video it, we of course did, because well, that openssl thingy was one of the most important things in the Debian world in 2008.) > My suggestion > would be to reserve either a room or a time slot every day for such > cases. Then it's scheduled - just the topic is missing. Sounds like a good idea to me. > 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. There is a bit lot more involved than just switching tapes. Also, people need breaks. So if you can, I think 15min breaks would be best. Also for the audience. 10min are fine too, 5min are really too short. (But better than none.) > 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. I think if attendence is not high, people are not interested. > I tried also to assemble talks which seem to be covering a similar > field on one day. That was nice! > 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.) Might be fixed in 0.3.17 - there were several fixes to the scheduler. http://pentabarf.org/Changelog/0.3.17 > 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" Not sure about midnight but I like the idea of having fun talks at the end of the day. Though maybe they are a good start in the day? Especially if we have dinner at 21/22oo I doubt it's sensible to schedule talks after that. I dont think we need to go with full hour scheduling. People are smart enough and have calenders and alarms, so I assume they will manage talks starting at a quarter past or to. Thinking about slots, I think a small break after the long sieasta break would also be nice, so maybe something like this: talks from 10.30 - 13.00 break from 13.00 - 16.00 talks from 16.00 - 18.00 break from 18.00 - 18.30 talks from 18.30 - 21.30 regards, Holger
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.