Re: GUADEC 2016: length and schedule

Hi,

On Do, 2015-11-05 at 19:03 +0000, Allan Day wrote:
> Huge thanks to the team that are putting on GUADEC this year. It's
> fantastic that you've stepped up, and Karlsruhe looks like a cool
> city!
> 
> I've been involved in the papers committee for a fair few years now,
> and I've been involved in doing hte conference schedule for at least
> the past 3/4 years. I was interested to see that your bid proposes
> only having two core days for GUADEC next year.

The reason for this proposal is that this was suggested to us at GUADEC
this year (I am not exactly sure who suggested it). This matches what
Dave said in his reply. 

> Until 2014, GUADEC had 4 core days. Then, this year, we switched to 3
> days. This was a bit of a challenge for the schedule: we just managed
> to squeeze everything in, but only just.

GUADEC as a conference has been shrinking quite a bit in the last years
(have a look at https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/HowTo/EstimateAttendees).
And I would say that the conference has changed quite a lot and is much
more community driven at this point. But I find it hard to qualify what
exactly changed and what the cause/effect here is.

Yes, if we are going down to two days we will need to cut down on the
number of talk slots and reject more talks. The potential benefit is a
higher average quality of the talks at GUADEC.

> If we want to go down to two core days, we'll probably have to
> radically rethink the schedule. Possibilities might involve cutting
> the lightning talks, and/or cutting the length of the talks. It seems
> like a good idea to talk about this early on.
> 
> I'll also say that I'm a little hesitant about cutting down the length
> of the core days from a social point of view, and that it would be a
> big change from the 4 day conference we were holding until just last
> year. That's not to say that there might not be advantages to the
> change, but it probably deserves some discussion.

The issue of having fewer social events and less time for general
conversations is a real one, and I actually consider this the main
argument to stick with three days right now.

Maybe the best way forward would be to create some mock schedules of
how a two day event might look like. Then the paper committee can
comment on whether they think the amount of slots would be reasonable
assuming a similar pool of submissions as last year.


An alternative would be actively work on increasing the scope of
GUADEC. It appears to me that the free software community is more
scattered these days as there are more projects with events of their
own. Also, other areas (web, containers, …) are receiving much more
(corporate) attention than the desktop.

Alexandre already mentioned Elementary and Cinnamon. Do people agree
that we would like to invite representatives from other desktop
environments that use GNOME technology to GUADEC? Anyone up to
contacting them?

Benjamin

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