Re: GUADEC 2016: length and schedule

David King <[email protected]> wrote:
...
> I have also been on the papers committee for the last couple of years.
> Given the general quality and freshness of talk proposals received

I'd be interested to hear more about how you feel the quality of talks
has gone down. Do you think that there are a small proportion of good
talks, or is it that almost all talks are less good than they used to
be? It might be interesting to review the talks from the past 2-3
years?

> I can
> see little problem with dropping to only 2 core days. Reducing the length of
> time allocated to each talk would be my preference, if it is desirable to
> keep the same number of talks on the schedule.

So there's a number issues here. First, maybe we should have a wider
discussion about talk quality and how to improve it. Perhaps providing
guidelines on the kind of talks that we want would help, for example,
or perhaps we could get other projects to participate more, as Sri
suggested.

Second question is whether reducing the number of talks and their
length would actually improve the quality, and make the conference
better. This relates to the proportion of the talks that we consider
to be good quality, whether short talks are as effective, and the
social function of having talks that maybe aren't top quality.

Third issue is that we have a lot of general sessions in the schedule:
we tend to have around 2 hours for the Foundation AGM, plus two
lightning talk sessions of 1.5 hours each, plus keynotes. This takes
up a large proportion of the time. Based on this year's schedule,
going down from 3 to 2 core days would result in a loss of 10 of 23
talks - that's a nearly 45% loss.

Fourth: we need to consider the more general impact of having fewer
days. It's not just talks: it means less time to get to know people,
to catch up with fellow contributors, and to have hallway
conversations.

Fifth, we might want to rethink how the hackfest days are organised,
either in terms of reducing the number of days, or expanding them to
include more than just BoFs.

Lots to think about!

Allan