Re: [Debconf-team] Inviting certain people, Mitnick
Hi,
On Mon, Jan 03, 2011 at 11:40:29PM +0100, Adnan Hodzic wrote:
> As we discussed on our last meeting, I mentioned inviting certain
> people to participate on DebConf11, have a lecture or whatever. All of
> this is to "exploit" whole event so we could get more interest and
> basically introduce ~60million users to this Debian. Also we discussed
> that this would be more of a mention/notification rather then
> invitation. My initial idea was to invite Stallman, after discussed
> this it turned out he's really not a person to invite. Mostly because
> it could stray attention from original idea, and would more harm whole
> event rather then help it.
>
> But another person I was thinking we could notify/invite/whatever
> would be Kevin Mitnick. Only thing we could debate over is would be
> probably "what does he have to do with Debian, or DebConf"? Right now
> I don't have a lot of clue, except the fact that government would
> probably like if we're bringing someone like him, regarding security
> of course. And because then this whole event could be exposed through
> media even more of course.
Personally, I think that we were very lucky with Columbia as location for
last year's Debconf, as a lot of great minds were living nearby (i.e.
New York or Boston). I am not sure how many of those "non-Debian" (but
awesome) speakers were invited by the local team, but my gut feeling
would be that a lot of them just submitted talks because they themselves
thought Debconf was awesome and right around the corner this time, so
they should go.
Now, I think we have to be careful about inviting speakers from all over
the world (instead of a day's bus ride away). Some Debconf participants
might think "why does this guy give a talk, he's not even involved with
Debian, another one or two DDs from the US could be sponsored to attend
instead of him".
In general, I think the keynote approach we explored last year was quite
successful, but I would suggest trying to think of interesting people
from the local area first. And with local area, maybe south-east europe
would do, after all, Debconf11 is the first Debconf in south-eastern
europe. Are there some interesting politicians fighting for Free
Software or net neutrality or free speech in the area? Or some artists
who do awesome creative-commons work? Some hackers who create great
things with little resources?
If we don't find anybody around locally (and I am quite certain we
would), we can still look for keynote speakers on a global level.
Just my 0.02 EUR,
Michael
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