Hello everyone,
As you'd know we plan to organize a MiniDebConf in Amrita University, Amritapuri, Kerala in the month of October this year[1].
We'd planned on creating a funnel for the same and honestly we've gotten nowhere. That however is not the main issue IMHO, I recently met with Mr. Harshad Gune(I don't know if he's in this list) and he came up with the suggestion to overlook the funnel. A lot of you would know him as he's been organizing the GNUnify for the past 13 years. According to him, since we're organizing a MiniDebConf for the first time, we could overlook the funnel for the following reasons :
- A funnel is hosted in the public domain and as it has happened in the past, if a group of students decide to upvote a certain talk that we wouldn't want to have, it leaves us in an awkward situation. Yes, we can still decide on what talks we want to have, but being the organizers for the first time, I don't know if that would look good.
- Setting up a funnel would take some time(we'd need help if we were to go ahead with setting up one) and we're running out of time. So, an individual has to dedicate his time setting and maintaining one. Needless to say this is likely to take more effort and time as compared to other methods like getting inputs from a google-doc. Our college reopens on the 16th and then, we the organizing team from the college, would really find their hands full and any help(in any way possible) would help us a lot.
- Once the funnel has been setup and proposals accepted, one still has to analyse the content of talks the no. of votes etc, which is likely to take even more time(which we'd be lacking)
For the reasons mentioned above, I think it might be a good idea to overlook creating a funnel for this edition of the MiniDebConf in Amrita University. I'd love to have had a funnel setup for the event(we could still setup one if required), but the whole process seems a bit time consuming.
Let me know what you think of the above mentioned at the earliest.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-dug-in/2014/06/msg00003.html
Warm Regards.