I had a chance to attend two days of the currently ongoing Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando this week. I must say, Canonical has some good practices when it comes to organizing a large, mutli-day event with lots of different tracks. I'd like to take a moment to describe what they do, in hopes Fedora event planning can glean some useful ideas.
* 14 separate tracks, running in parallel. You can't hope to make it to everything, either at UDS or FUDCon, but I thought this was a lot. * In each room, they have 2 projectors running: 1 for the discussion leader (though I saw very few slides projected; almost none); 1 for the IRC room dedicated to that physical room. * In each room, they have a set of stereo microphones (4 mics it looked like) at the front of the room. These are connected to an icecast server, such that there is a separate icecast stream running all the time for each physical room. The sound is very clear with a 56kbps stereo vorbis stream. * One IRC channel for each physical room. ** The combination of IRC and icecast lets people participate remotely. * For each session, an assigned note-taking person would keep notes in gobby. Often times these notes were displayed on the discussion leader's projector. In most sessions, others in the room with laptops would also connect to gobby and help take notes. They had a "newer" version of gobby, gobby-infinote, but the gobby server was overloaded much of the time and kept dropping connections. I heard people comment that last year they had gobby problems too - they had it working by Thursday that week, but it was pretty broken at the start of the week this time too. * in each room, there are power strips taped to the floors on each 2 rows of chairs
That's all for now...
Thanks, Matt
On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 15:49:02 -0500, Matt Domsch matt@domsch.com wrote:
** The combination of IRC and icecast lets people participate remotely.
We also have Fedora Talk which can allow remote participamts to talk to the group. But you need to manage this carefully. I've gone through a couple of FADs doing this.
One thing I found is that to effectively be a remote participant you really need to get up to speed in advance. Trying to follow as you go seems to make it hard to effectively participate. You seem to always end up trailing the group. So I would suggest groups that want remote participants have agendas and background reading available in advance.
fudcon-planning@lists.fedoraproject.org