So something in the middle would be useful, e.g. a Kanban with a (implicit, automatic) list "waiting for other tasks", containing all the jobs that can't yet be done, and which are automatically moved to "to-do" as soon as the dependencies are completed.
We use Kanban at work, and the way we use it we have "stories" and "tasks". Each story is made up of up to 5 tasks, and each task is a smallish unit of work. We have colour codes for our tasks, and we manage dependencies by completing what tasks we need to do, and then using purple tasks as "blockers" - something that is outside of your control, but that you need to continue - to indicate that you cannot continue the story until the blocker has been resolved. It's not as "elegant" as a Gantt chart, but it helps us to manage our dependencies.
Not sure if this would work for DebConf, but you're welcome to the idea ;-)
-- Raoul Snyman e: raoul@snyman.info Please note that my e-mail address has changed!