Re: critics about our presence at LinuxTag 2004

[Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>]

Alexander Schmehl wrote:
> > > I you even can't do this, ask Joey for the code and change it in a
> > > way that he can administrate talks which don't fill a full hour.
> > that would allow Joey to schedule talks shorter than an hour? I don't
> > really follow what you mean here.
> 
> The main reason not having a schedule with half hour time slots was,
> that Joey currently can't administrate them, and I therefore set hourly
> talks, although I knew, that not every speaker will use the full hour.
> Therefore our visitors thought talks would fill a full hour.

Well, I don't believe that talks shorter than 30 minutes are useful
for the audience to schedule at all.  Those could (should?) be held at
the booth, maybe even on demand and not scheduled.

One hour slots mean:
  45min talk             30min talk
  10min discussion       15min max. discussion
   5min changing         15min changing

So the current system is already capable of half hour talks, which
would be followed by an extended discussion period, which could be
quite helpful for the audience.  Slots in the main conference tracks
last 90 minutes, which means that the speaker can use up to 60 minutes
for his talk and still has time for discussion.  Anyway, I believe
that this is a bit too long.

For the audience, concentrating on a single topic for 45-60 minutes is
ok.  Longer may be a problem, and shorter talks seem to be too short.

Hence, I don't believe that 60 minutes slots are too large.

However, if you can't talk for 30 minutes about one issue, you
(plural) may check if it may be useful to split the overall talk into
two parts held by two people, and each of them has ~15 minutes for
different details of the same overall topic.

Regards,

	Joey

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