Hi > No live Q&A after talks makes it a more friendly environment for > first time and new speakers. @ericholscher has written about this and
I cannot subscribe to either of this. Much has been said, most importantly, start small, at a local user meeting if you are scared to talk in front of lots of people. If one really don't want questions, just talk out completely the alotted time, the session chair will say "we don't have time" or "only time for a very short question" and there we are. I seriously considering shooting ourself in the knee even pondering such an idea. The amount of positive feedback and suggestions I have heard over my years talking at conference far outweights the very few stupid comments - which one anyway can ignore. Critical and tough questions are the best one can get, because the challenge what you have done and might open new avenues. Personal experience it is. > Anyway, whilst I am in no way suggesting DebConf takes an identical > approach (!!), I would be curious to know whether if we are missing any > new contributions this way. This is the next line of thinking I cannot subscribe. Of course we loose contributions. But we also loose contributions because we don't require women to go fully veiled, thus some people will not attend our conferences. What I want to say is that we exclude lots of contributions by the specific style, topic, and culture, and that is *good*so*. We don't need each and everyone. Best Norbert -- PREINING Norbert http://www.preining.info Accelia Inc. + JAIST + TeX Live + Debian Developer GPG: 0x860CDC13 fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
