On Wednesday, May 26, 2010 08:13:39 am Paul W. Frields wrote:
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:
We *really* need to consider a four-day FUDCon in North America.
Each day should have fewer active rooms (sessions) at a time.
We need better information for attendees, such as a welcome packet for people at the hotel.
you forgot step 4. we really should have a simple breakfast onsite (i.e. coffee and bagels/muffins) to encourage people to be there on time. if people are eating and drinking coffee offsite they are more likely to be late.
Dennis