couple of comments
I totally agree. This is our biggest challenge. FUDCons in LATAM have
been too "talk-centric". We need more hackfests, but in first place we
need to identify who is the public we are aiming at and then who can
lead this kind of sessions. Secondly, we need to treat those sessions
accordingly. Hackfests are not common in LATAM and we need to promote
them in a educative way: explaining what it means, what is needed to
participate properly and why we need it.
this is a pro and cons, remember that no everyone has a laptop in latam, so we have to prepare hackfest and workshops where people can interact too. The change from conferences to more "do" is a win+win, but has to be organized so all those who really want to "do" can withouth be excluded.
I'm sure that will be a way to solve this since the event will be hold in "city of knowledge" :D
also, there can be some small talks outside the rooms and use them to "entertain" to those who are not ready yet to contribute directly to the Project. Also will be a lot of enthusiastic who doesn't even know what's linux. So what I believe is that we should manage to focus on make that all the attendans feel bussy without care their skills.
I know everyone is worried in do, but LATAM is a growing community and we also must take care of the new talents :)
This is a really good idea, Dennis. But the organizers will need a big
help on this because bar camps aren't common in LATAM either. Some of
LATAM contributors will have this experience in Tempe and this will help
to improve things. It is also good to have the bar camp process
documented in FUDCon Panama wiki page in order to inform people what a
bar camp is about.
A bar camp solution could be set a space for those talks that didn't make out, or to those people that didn't want to put their names in the wiki. So everyone could have a chance (using post-it or whatever like) to have a small conference that can be used to give a chance to new contributors (maybe smaller conferences/hacklabs) to show their own advances.
I think that as long we take care that everyone (developers, new users, and curious people) feel that there is something to them, will be a winning fudcon :)