FUDCon (insert name of city here) Barcamp

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 07:38:49PM -0400, Steven M. Parrish wrote:
> During the events FAD in Raleigh it was discussed that the next NA FUDCon 
> should be 4 days long, up from the current 3.  1 1/2 to 2 days  for Barcamp 
> with the balance to hackfests.  
> 
> I've been thinking about the barcamps and how much time it takes out of the 
> 1st day.  What I am thinking is this.  For the next NA FUDCon we solicit 
> proposals in advance.  Proposals can be written in the wiki or the prefered 
> method would be a video proposal.  All talks proposed atleast X number of days 
> in advance would be voted on by the registered attendees before arriving at 
> FUDCon and will comprise the talks scheduled for day 1.
> 
> After the FPLs opening remarks we can have people make proposals for day 2 
> talks.  We can then put up the normal grid and have people vote on the talks 
> throughout the day and announce the following days schedule that evening.  
> This will eliminate the hour or so voting and getting everything organized 
> that morning. 
> 
> Also since I believe day 1 would be a Friday I would suggest that the user 
> tracks be scheduled for day 2.  That would allow locals who have to work on 
> Friday to attend those sessions on Saturday.
> 
> Comments?

Greg DeKoenigsberg said that he didn't believe we were doing a real
BarCamp any more.  Pre-screening and scheduling talks, for example,
isn't a BarCamp.  His point was (IIRC) that the speakers needed to be
jointly responsible for creating/fixing the schedule, rather than
having a small group of people doing it.  Unfortunately, as our number
of speakers has grown it's become increasingly difficult to do that.
In RDU, for example, we probably had something like 25 or 30 speakers.
In Toronto, it was closer to 55.  At the next FUDCon, if we end up in
Tempe near ASU, chances are we'll have a pretty sizable bunch of
students and LUG folks in attendance, and I'm predicting *at least* as
many people in total as in Toronto, which was over 200.

On top of that, one of the most consistent comments people heard and
which was reflected in the survey was that there was too much good
content going at once.  In a way that's a compliment, but in a
practical sense we need to make very good use of the time spent at
FUDCon face to face.  Providing so much content at once, jammed into
one day where people can't attend half of what they want or need to,
makes FUDCon less effective.

Finally, we had a problem with getting people to the event on time, so
we were delayed in our day of talks.  We can prevent that problem with
better planning and advance notice to attendees.

At the Events FAD this past winter most people agreed on three things:

1. We *really* need to consider a four-day FUDCon in North America.

2. Each day should have fewer active rooms (sessions) at a time.

3. We need better information for attendees, such as a welcome packet
   for people at the hotel.

Item 1 will raise the cost of FUDCon a bit, but we can probably handle
it through careful budget management and by seeing if we can strike a
deal with one or more hotels nearby the site.  Item 2 shouldn't be a
problem, for instance, if we scale down from six rooms at a time to
four.  Finally, item 3 is simply a matter of better planning and
documentation on the wiki, and getting some dead-tree printouts for
the hotel to distribute on-site at checkin.

With two days and fewer sessions at a time, we should be able to
return to a purer BarCamp style for either or both days and have
things work better.  The issue we would want to settle is how to break
up those days, so that we don't have 50-60 people pitching on the
first morning.  And we need to do that breaking up in some fashion
where (1) speakers can easily determine which day to do a specific
talk, and (2) we don't inadvertently shut out people who can only show
up for one day.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
          Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com