On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 10:56 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 10:40:34AM -0500, Tom Callaway wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Last year, we had:
> 67 speakers (for talks and workshops).
> 3 keynotes (2 + FPL)
> 34 talks across two days (five simultaneous tracks)
> 24 workshops across two days (four tracks)
>
> In 2016, we have the same amount of days (4), but I wanted to open it
> for discussion for changes to the scheduling and layout.
>
> Do we want less tracks? Less talks? Less workshops per day?
I continue to believe fewer tracks and talks, and replacing the extra
time with workshops led to get things done, would be great for Flock.
Too much content means speakers are talking to only a few people in
some cases, which is hardly worth giving a talk for (not to mention
subsidizing travel in some cases).
See my other email about attendance though. It's a balance, and we
cannot pretend that our attendees are not made up of mostly speakers.
> Do we still want the keynotes in the mornings? Traditionally,
we've
> focused on bringing in external keynote speakers, but we had a lot of
> difficulty doing this the last time we were in Europe. (It is also
> unclear who is responsible for handling keynotes this year, as it was my
> job in previous years.)
Personally I would rather not use up valuable time on them, given my
earlier stance. It would be hypocritical of me to suggest fewer
tracks and talks and then further eat into talk opportunities with
more keynotes.
> Also, it seems unclear to me when the CFP closes (it is open now).
This was not nailed down, but we suggested a 6 week period would be
appropriate. I would suggest we use March 14 as a deadline. We could
optionally extend to April 1 (no joke) if needed, which is
F-minus-4months for scheduling.
Whatever deadline we choose, I volunteer to put out a F-Mag
article and internal info about the deadline.
We need to include the information about no votes. That wasn't
included in the Flock announce. That also means we need to figure out
our talk selection committee. Spot and I can probably do that.
> Paul, Matt, Remy, Jen, Joe, I'm looking at you to drive
answers to these
> questions.
I'd like to see a weekly Flock planning meeting at this point. We
No meeting without a clear agenda. I'm not convinced we're going to
make progress on enough things to meet weekly yet. I'd suggest every
other week. Or really, I'd suggest a weekly status email from people
that own action items and only meet as a whole if there's something we
cannot work on via email. We need action, not meetings.
Besides, most of the people that would be involved in said meeting
already have a ton of meetings. Scheduling another would be a
headache.
josh