Ok...
So
regardless of how this boils down, I see John's POV as well as Bjorn's
POV.
From
a
scheduling perspective, it is a royal pain (as Bjorn's detailed
examples
proved).
But
from a
presenter standpoint... John is right as well. It can be tough to fill
a 4 hour
tutorial with enough juicy content to keep your attendees from going to
sleep.
And nothing is going to keep attendees from escaping one tutorial and
popping
into another to check it out (and repeating the process multiple times
over the
course of 8 hours of tutorials to choose from).
Where
does that
leave me and DTP? It leaves me with no tutorial to fill my slot. The
DTP PMC
discussed today ways to remedy the situation, since we feel a tutorial
slot is
mandatory for us to keep promoting DTP and getting the word out. We
will be
submitting a separate tutorial proposal with multiple presenters in a
day or
two.
From
my
perspective, at a conference, I'd rather have too many choices than too
few.
Two hour tutorials would not only allow a presenter enough time to work
through
one topic really well, but it's also about as long as any of us really
want to
sit in a room before we have to get up and walk around to get blood
flow going
again.
Hate
to rock
the boat a little, but even though I understand the trouble with
scheduling
these tutorials, I think we're doing a bit of an injustice to our
conference
attendees by assuming that we're making this too tough for them to
comprehend
and choose among their options. I'm not saying we ditch 4 hour
tutorials, but a
mix of 2 and 4 hour tutorials could work if we had more than a couple.
That
said, we
will submit a late tutorial proposal to retain our DTP slot and keep on
chugging.
--Fitz
Brian Fitzpatrick
Eclipse Data Tools Platform PMC Chair
Eclipse Data Tools Platform Connectivity Team Lead
Staff Software Engineer, Sybase, Inc.
PC members,
See John's bitter comment below. Please note that my objection to
2-hour
tutorials was about having only two 2-hour tutorials, not about 2-hour
tutorials
in general. Here's the situation:
We have 20 parallel tutorials going on at the same time. Thus at 8am,
T1, T2,
T3, ..., T10, T11, T12, ..., T19, T20 all start at the same time. They
all end
at noon. Then, at 1pm, we have T21, T22, ..., T39, T40 all starting at
the same time and all ending at 5pm.
If we have *one* of the slots divided into two 2-hour tutorials, we
have:
8am T1, T2, ..., T20 start
10am T1 ends and T21 starts
noon T2, ..., T20, T21 end
1pm T22, ..., T41 start
5pm T22, ..., T41 end
>From the attendees point of view, they can either attend T1 and
then T21 or
they can attend any of T2, ..., T20. In other words, the two 2-hour
tutorials
are not offering the attendees any choice: they are still locked into
the
T1-T21 block because at the end of T1 there is no other choice of what
to
attend next.
However, if we had, say, 10 of the slots turned into 2x2-hour
tutorials, then
there would be choice at 10am: in fact, there would be ten choices of
what to
take next.
8am T1, ..., T20 start
10am T1, ..., T10 end and T21, ..., T30 start
noon T11, .., T30 end
1pm T31, ..., T50 start
5pm T31, ..., T50 end
So, if the program committee wants to have enough 2-hour tutorial slots
so as
to provide a choice to the attendees, I'll be +1. But if it's just one
or
two slots being divided into 2x2-hours, I'm against it because it's bad
for the
attendees.
-------- Original Message --------
John Graham (2008-12-02 15:16:32)
wrote:
Withdrawing this proposal since I understand that the PC is not
willing to
consider 2 hour tutorials, despite earlier indications to the
contrary.
Disappointed that no good reasons seem to be offered for this
limitation,
and I wonder how many good sessions will be eliminated as a
result of this
arbitrary change of policy.
https://www.eclipsecon.org/submissions/2009/view_talk.php?id=581
--
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