Re: [Debconf-team] debconf 15 "opening weekened"
On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 07:40:52PM +0200, Margarita Manterola wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Ana Guerrero Lopez <ana@debian.org> wrote:
> > In the website in important dates, it says that the 15-16 August is the
> > "opening weekened (geared to the public") and those appears also as DebConf
> > days. It seems like this has been decided already. Before jumping to conclusions,
> > could you please explain what does this exactly mean?
>
> This is something that has been mentioned several times in several
> different meetings, although it might be that it was not discussed
> on-list up to now.
>
> It is inspired on the DebianDay event that has taken place several
> times in the past (although not in DC14 nor DC13), but with a twist.
>
> The Open Weekend is part of DebConf, but given geographical proximity
> to other cities, we figured that quite a lot more people would choose
> to attend on that weekend alone. This includes particularly people
> that are not as involved in Debian as the usual Debian contributors,
> who will be interested enough to spend the weekend but not the whole
> week.
>
> Taking this into account, the idea was to schedule a broader set of
> events on that weekend (which also includes Debian's birthday) and
> invite the general public to join us. Broader events does not mean
> introductory level talks (i.e. the typical DebianDay schedule), but
> rather things like the keynotes that we had this year, the DPL report,
> talks about cross-project affecting tools, lightning talks,
> workshops/tutorials, keysigning, etc.
>
> The goal would be to select the talks that are more suitable to a
> broader audience and schedule them during that weekend, whereas more
> specific/internal talks (like team BOFs for example) would be
> scheduled during the week. This shouldn't influence talk selection at
> all, just scheduling.
>
> For the sake of completion, I must say that in parallel with the
> official talks, there was some interest in having some introductory
> level workshops, but this has not been agreed, and personally I'm not
> sure if we actually want it, and if we do which format it should take.
>
Hi,
Thank you for the reply, I wanted to know exactly what the localteam
had in mind before commenting on it.
I'm not a big fan of the DebianDay because after trying different
formulas, it never hasn't been worth the effort. We have already tried
the idea of putting the "more broadr events" during the debianday,
we did this at least at dc10. I also think that despite Heidelberg
being close to other cities won't work -as happened in previous years -
due it being in the middle of the summer holidays and therefore
people just having other plans.
In case, it is not clear, I think we could pretty much skip this,
but it seems the localteam really wants to do something targetted
to users that weekend and you haven't fully defined yet what to
do, so let me do a proposal for something really different
that was already more or less hinter in your last paragraph:
What about doing a "users minidebconf"? What I mean with this:
- having the event in parallel to DebConf. (dedicating a room to
this sub-event for two days.)
- the talks are really adapted for users to get started in Debian.
So it's totally independent of debconf's talks schedule and call for
talks(*)
- if you put "users" in the name, it will sound more welcoming to
users to attend. Debian's development conference is somehow scary
for people.
And of course, be clear that users are always invited to attend
any Debconf talk, just we had a weekend with talks more adapted
to them.
(*) Personally this is the only part that bothers me the most
about the debconf open weekend. I don't like the idea of putting
all the "important" events in the first weekend. It's nicer
distributing them through the week and it hurts less to people
having to miss the first debconf weekend.
Ana
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