Hi, On Mon, Jan 03, 2011 at 11:40:29PM +0100, Adnan Hodzic wrote: > As we discussed on our last meeting, I mentioned inviting certain > people to participate on DebConf11, have a lecture or whatever. All of > this is to "exploit" whole event so we could get more interest and > basically introduce ~60million users to this Debian. Also we discussed > that this would be more of a mention/notification rather then > invitation. My initial idea was to invite Stallman, after discussed > this it turned out he's really not a person to invite. Mostly because > it could stray attention from original idea, and would more harm whole > event rather then help it. > > But another person I was thinking we could notify/invite/whatever > would be Kevin Mitnick. Only thing we could debate over is would be > probably "what does he have to do with Debian, or DebConf"? Right now > I don't have a lot of clue, except the fact that government would > probably like if we're bringing someone like him, regarding security > of course. And because then this whole event could be exposed through > media even more of course.
Personally, I think that we were very lucky with Columbia as location for last year's Debconf, as a lot of great minds were living nearby (i.e. New York or Boston). I am not sure how many of those "non-Debian" (but awesome) speakers were invited by the local team, but my gut feeling would be that a lot of them just submitted talks because they themselves thought Debconf was awesome and right around the corner this time, so they should go. Now, I think we have to be careful about inviting speakers from all over the world (instead of a day's bus ride away). Some Debconf participants might think "why does this guy give a talk, he's not even involved with Debian, another one or two DDs from the US could be sponsored to attend instead of him". In general, I think the keynote approach we explored last year was quite successful, but I would suggest trying to think of interesting people from the local area first. And with local area, maybe south-east europe would do, after all, Debconf11 is the first Debconf in south-eastern europe. Are there some interesting politicians fighting for Free Software or net neutrality or free speech in the area? Or some artists who do awesome creative-commons work? Some hackers who create great things with little resources? If we don't find anybody around locally (and I am quite certain we would), we can still look for keynote speakers on a global level. Just my 0.02 EUR, Michael _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
