RE: [eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee] Questions for Bjorn

["Gaff, Doug" <doug.gaff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 

From: eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bjorn Freeman-Benson
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2007 3:50 PM
To: Eclipsecon Program Committee list
Subject: Re: [eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee] Questions for Bjorn

 

Doug and all,

Extracted from the meeting minutes.

 

The mailing list and the wiki are not public. Doug explained the philosophy behind this. However, if you follow the pattern for other mailing lists, you can get to the archive: http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/eclipse.org-eclipsecon-program-committee/maillist.html. Is this an issue?

We (webmaster) can remove the archives complete if you want. That has the disadvantage of none of us being able to refer to previous conversations either. We could also put .htaccess files on the archives. Or we could just leave them as "semi-hidden". Up to you all.

Semi-hidden is fine, I think.  I was just pointing it out.  I just don’t want it indexed by google, in case we say something like, “this keynote speaker really sucked”.

 

Is it acceptable if the track leads decide they want extra talk slots in the hotel? DougG and the track leads seem fine with having the conference extend into the hotel to make sure we can cover enough topics.

I'm not wild about that idea for two reasons:

1. Putting tracks in the hotel causes a segmenting of the community and the conference, to me, is all about bringing the community together to bump into each other and talk to each other. Barriers to that socializing should be avoided.
2. Each additional talk/track has financial implications. We've budgeted for a certain number of talks and tracks. Adding to that number increases our costs and (generally) does not increase the number of attendees. Simple math tells us that is not good.

I realize that all the track chairs want to have lots and lots and lots of talks about their topic. My feeling (and experience) is that we should have fewer, higher quality, talks about each topic. We should use short talks to allow a large number of people a chance to talk and we should use the long talks for the really good speakers about the really in-demand topics. Think "No Fluff Just Stuff" style rather than "everyone on the project gets a chance to talk for an hour" style.

#1 didn’t seem to bother the P.C.

 

#2 is more problematic.  I agree that more short talks is a better idea.  Let’s see how the track allocations pan out and then review the content the track leads want to get covered.

 

Where can we get feedback from previous EclipseCon's?

We don't have a lot of feedback - we tried to gather it for a couple years, but the response rate was so low that I gave up. If anybody has a great idea about how to get more valid feedback, I'd love to implement it.

Can we get attendance details for the tutorial / conference attendance?

You want the number of people who attended EclipseCon in the last few years and the numbers who attended each of the tutorials?

Yes.