Thought on planning schedules and Do-Con

[María Leandro]

Hello all.

I have been mostly quiet trying to help and doing my best to make my small
part of this responsibility work; however i do have some thoughts i would
like to share.

1.- About Conference Schedule:  No; there is no way the schedule, not this
year and neither next ones; will fulfill every one expectations. Main
reason is that even if we are trying to do a DO-Con, we are trying to work
with 8 different teams. Truth is that at least 70% of us work with more
than one team. Not FEsCo, not Board, not even organizers will be able to
manage a perfect schedule while having so many rooms.
Ideas for this:
*  While more rooms, less probabilities of attend to your preferred talks.
*  Next time we could try to have at least 1 empty room all day only for
meetings of those people who couldn't see each other at talks or for random
purpose meeting (no, not a room for hacking, an extra empty room that can
be used for 45min or 2hours period)

2.- About Event Overall: Everyone has this huge expectations on what a
DO-Con is but there is NO way we can have both worlds on it. You either
consider the developers and "Doers" or you consider the full community,
which includes people that watch talks but doesn't do anything. A
successful Doers conference can't be this "super mega huge" event because
Number 1 rule to let people Do is to not distract them and don't make them
run into different rooms every 45min.
* You either let the world know about how awesome Fedora is, or you give
them time to work and make Fedora that awesome.

What I think is that in this pursuit of being bigger than other commercial
USA events, we have a lack of attention into the small details that make
contributors do their work at this gatherings.

What do I think we should do? Stop trying to conquer the world at a main
event and start focusing into teams. We have FADs, which are small events
that clearly bring new contributions into Fedora; Why don't we try to
recruit everyone everywhere? I just see that in this need of bigger
attention, this kind of events will only reinforce the actual contributors
but not the new and potential ones, and remember, the number of Fedora
contributors that works for RH isn't as big as the number of contributors
that have their own life and responsibilities; which means that the 60/70%
of the non RH contributors will eventually vanish; so we are talking that
we constantly need to be recruiting people that is able to do the Fedora
work.

Now I'm wondering; why don't we spend this enormous amount of money and
time into make smaller events everywhere; no FUDcons, not FADs, more like
hackfest days, Do-days, name it; and gather those teams that need at least
2/3 days lock inside a room to develop and fix parts of Fedora that truly
need attention?

Conferences are places to spread what we do and to recruit people; if you
don't give people a bit of freedom inside this events, at the end, they
will be so busy trying to attend to so many talks that at the 4th day, they
won't have develop or write a single line of code.

People making decisions needs to stop a bit, read what their community has
to say, and act based on that. So please, instead trying to find solutions
into corporate events, try to look down to your community and listen to
what they have to say; Fedora isn't a company, is a community, and if I'm
wrong, please excuse my words and move on.

Sorry for the long mail :)




2013/6/25 Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com>

> On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 03:15:32PM -0400, Ruth Suehle wrote:
> >
> > If there's something useful we can do to amend the schedule this time
> around,
> > let's talk about what that is in concrete terms. If it's just "this
> could be
> > useful next time," let's talk about it on August 14. We've got enough to
> worry
> > about for Flock 2013 without trying to start 2014 until it's over!
> >
> <nod>  My intention was just to put down thoughts for future flocks -- not
> to derail the planning for the current flock :-)  We can definitely get
> back
> to all of this once we're back from flock 2013 :-)
>
> -Toshio
>
> _______________________________________________
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> flock-planning at lists.fedoraproject.org
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>
>


-- 
tatica
Maria Gracia Leandro
http://www.tatica.org
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:tatica
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