Re: GUADEC 2017: Length and Format

On 27 July 2016 at 10:28, Allan Day <[email protected]> wrote:
> Debarshi Ray <[email protected]> wrote:
> ...
>>
>> >    - Switch to two days of talks and two days of "hack days".
>> >    - Advertise the conference as a four day event. The fact that the
>> > first
>> >    two days are talks would be a minor footnote only; when people say
>> > they
>> >    want to come, we give them the dates for the four days.
>>
>> Four days (2 + 2) sounds too short to me.

I would be happy to see a 2 day conference if there are 3 tracks. I do
think that the BoFs need 3 days or we need more rooms than we
currently have. The benefit of longer BoF days is that teams can work
hackfests in with GUADEC rather than have a separate event.
Additionally, fewer BoFs clash if slots are available over more days.

>> While a 8 day conference with 4 days of BoFs can be considered too
>> much, are we really struggling to fill up the slots over a 6 day (3 +
>> 3) schedule?
>
>
> Not that I'm aware of.
>
>>
>> Last time this was discussed, there was a concern about the lack of
>> good quality talk submissions. Did we explore the possibility of
>> having people from Elementary and Cinnamon attend GUADEC? Why do we
>> think that the quality of talk submissions have gone down? How about a
>> 5 day conference?
>
>
> I'm not particularly concerned about talk quality and that's not what's
> motivating this proposal.
>
>> I do like the idea of advertising the conference as one unit and
>> de-emphasizing the split between the core and BoF days. I am concerned
>> that going from 6 to 4 days would leave us with precious little time
>> for hallway and social interactions between people who barely meet
>> once every year.
>
>
> In my experience most people only attend for 3 or 4 days. One aspect of the
> proposal is to align the conference format with this pattern of attendance.
> Another aspect is to increase the amount of hallway time for those attendees
> who only attend for 3 or 4 days, since it will mean that they will spend a
> smaller proportion of their time sitting in talks.

Most sponsored attendees are coming for 6 days this year, with a few
people only able to make the weekend or weekend +1/2 days because of
work commitments. I think it's more important to make sure that the
core days do take place over the weekend.

> A possible modification to the proposal would be to tack on an additional
> "unconference" day at the end, making it 4+1 days. The unconference day
> would have minimal organisation, would be presented as being optional, and
> would primarily be for those who want to hang around a bit longer and hack.
>
> Thanks for the feedback, Debarshi!
>
> Allan
>
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