Re: Schedule proposals
Hi,
On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 6:24 AM, martin f krafft <madduck@debconf.org> wrote:
> Therefore, how about we tell dc-team that we are going to discuss
> this internally and will write to the whole list with our
> proposal(s) by the end of September? If we agree on a shared vision
> by then, great! If not, then we produce a wiki page comparing the
> different ideas, to bootstrap the discussion on dc-team.
I don't think this is necessary unless someone from the global team
raises the subject. Setting the times for meals and talks slots is
the kind of task that is normally done by the local team and later on
coordinated with Talks team to know how many talks they can schedule,
but there is not usually a global debate about it.
I think that whenever we have consensus we should post it on the
global ML and be done with it.
>> One of the comments I've heard in debconf this year was "having
>> the first talk just after breakfast and the last one after dinner
>> makes a really long day"
> That's only if you keep breakfast early and dinner late. ;)
No, this year dinner was very very early, and it led exactly to this issue.
> We are reintroducing DebCamp for continued hacking, and I think this
> alleviates the burden of having to create blocks of continuous hack
> time during the conference.
But are we? Definitely? I thought we wanted to see the feedback first?
I was surprised to hear that most people actually preferred the
"hacking time" intermixed with talks instead of a separate DebCamp.
> I think at DC15, we should definitely have "unconference blocks",
> which our attendees should use however they want. Some may hack,
> some may organise ad-hoc sessions, others may play. However, I feel
> that coordinating this beyond allowing for resources to be
> self-scheduled would harm the whole programme. Sessions that are of
> wider interest should have been scheduled in the main programme
> already. Anything else is ad-hoc and if anyone feels strongly about
> them, then they should get involved in the self-scheduling.
Right, that was what Maxy's original message was trying to do,
creating the "discussion" slots, during which people can have BOFs,
hackathons or whatever they want. The extra block of "hacking time"
allows to have a couple of hours where there are no talks or
discussions or anything. Because the overabundance of scheduled stuff
makes it hard to sit down and do other stuff (at least that was my
personal experience).
>> coffee 16:30-17:30
>
> I do like the idea of a coffee break on days with presentations, but
> it means we lose a full slot each day… definitely worthwhile to
> consider though! This will also be a good slot for the group photo,
> and just to get some fresh air…
Actually, if you look at the suggested blocks, they overlap with
coffee. The idea was to have the coffee+snacks served during this
time, without it meaning that no talks could be scheduled over it.
>> breakfast 08:00-09:30
> This surprises me, as my general understanding was that most people
> wanted the schedule to move backwards and days to start later,
> especially as the week progresses.
Personally, I'd prefer not to over-encourage this behavior. But I
think that letting breakfast run until 10:00 (which I believe is
actually the normal time for the hostel), should be fine.
> How about having breakfast until 10:00, starting the day with
> a plenary session at 10:30,
I'd go with breakfast until 10, and first plenary session starting at
10 as well. This means that if you want to be at the plenary session
you need to wake up earlier, but if you are not going anyway, you have
an extra half an hour.
Starting the plenary session at 10:30 means almost all of the morning
is already gone.
> 19:30 Dinner Dinner
> 21:00 Free time / session slot Maybe session slot
No, please let's not schedule stuff after dinner. Part of DebConf is
about socializing and it requires that talks are not happening in
order to make that possible. It also encourages this trend of getting
up later and later, which is then unfair to whoever has talks in the
morning.
> I would suggest that we consider experimenting with session lengths
> too. Many presentations I have witnessed at past DebConfs would have
> been better suited for a lightning talk, or maybe a 10 minute
> presentation, or maybe 25 minutes, instead of always having 45
> minutes.
Agreed, but this thread was about the schedule, not about the length
of talks... I think that should be discussed in a separate thread.
> Opening weekend: presentation days, possibly starting earlier
> in the day because we are all still rested, possibly jetlagged, and
> we might want to offer visitors more. So there are presentations,
> workshops, lightning talks, maybe plenary discussions, etc.
Opening weekend could have 8 talk slots, possibly in two tracks,
adding up to a maximum of 32 talk slots.
> Monday could be the first "free day", followed by another
> "presentation day" on Tuesday. Or the other way around. This really
> depends on how many presentation submissions we get, and how many of
> those we feel should be scheduled at full length etc.
We will definitely get more submissions than slots we will have. So I
don't think we need to make the schedule depend on that, but the other
way round. How many talks do we want? Those are the ones we should
schedule for.
I'm not sure I understand your "free days", but one of the things I
didn't like of DC14 is that it was very confusing. I think it's easy
for people to distinguish weekend vs weekday, and then know what kind
of schedule the day is going to have. But if the weekday schedule also
varies, that makes it much more confusing. i.e. I would prefer if we
could settle for the same schedule for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday,
Friday.
> And teardown has to be done by Sunday noon-time, so we might need to
> start on Saturday already, e.g. by closing down some of the rooms
> and moving the final presentations into the plenary room.
teardown is usually fast. We should probably do the teardown of video
equipment on Saturday and of hacklabs on Sunday.
--
Besos,
Marga
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