Thoughts from UDS

[Matt Domsch]

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