On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:36 PM, Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf <[email protected]> wrote: > I'll write a couple of mails to the list during the next days covering > several aspects (talks, the Dev-Room, the hotel and so on) of FOSDEM. I also > recorded all sessions on video and I'll post them on some online video > portal when I am done with some basic editing (adding a title mainly) of > them. > > > Some general words: > > - It was fun. All the work and dispair (because of the very slow start I was > several times at the brink of giving it all up) finally paid of.
Thanks for your efforts. > - Giving talks is fun. It was my first time and despite I had some crashes > to fight during my talk it still was fun. I felt very content after it. > > - It's really nice to meet all the people you usually talk to only at the > mailing list and the chat. Especially the dinner at saturday night is always > a highlight (we went to a pretty decent indian restaurant this year) > > - Quite some people asked for a Live-CD of GNUstep. I know there are (were?) > several ones, we had none. Also, most Live-CDs seem to be a little bit out > of date meanwhile (at least that's what people told me). So it would be nice > to have some good and up to date Live-CDs next year (Étoilé-folks and Gürkan > are you listening?). > > > Talks/Presentations: > > Interest was higher than I originally expected (I was going for the smallest > room available if you remember), it was most of the time more than two-third > full, in some talks the attendees even stood in the aisles. I also learned > that it seems to be very important what headline you give to your talk. The > more the attendees can imagine what the talk will be about the more likely > they are willing to come. Being somewhat catchy here certainly helps while > if you're using to many cryptic acronyms nobody knows (and if it's to early > in the morning) you'll probably end up giving a private talk to some single > person (despite giving a good talk) ;-) > > I have not exact counts or statistics but I had the impression that the > Étoilé talk drew the most people, despite the somewhat difficult > circumstances (basically, the "Pragmatic Smalltalk" talk was given twice, > once via iChat by David Chisnall and the second time by a helpful friend of > the Étoilé people (Sorry, I am not sure about his name - although having > seen him the years before - was it David?)). Interesting here is also that > nobody went out when not the originally planned "Étoilé" talk but he > "Pragmatic Smalltalk" talk was given. The helpful friend was Damien Pollet -- thanks a lot to him, as indeed it's not a sinecure to give somebody's else talk. > > I also noticed that knowledge about GNUstep is still no very widespread. > While we weren't getting those notorious "Ah, GNUstep, I use window maker > too!" remarks we usually have gotten at the stand in the years before, the > folks who came to the talks - already knowing GNUstep, otherwise you don't > go to a talk I think - still were not aware of many things GNUstep has to > offer. You always can impress them with Gorm for instance, most didn't know > that and what GNUstep offers for theming nor do they know details about the > frameworks. In essence you approach a lot of them at a quite basic level. > O.k. there are some OPENSTEP veterans mixed in but a lot of the attendees > would benefit from practical lessons about what for instance GNUstep base > and GNUstep gui have to offer. Basically you have to give your attendees a > reason to use GNUstep (for instance faster/easier app development, > integration of apps created that way into their desktop environment of > choice - develop once, deploy everywhere and such things). If you can offer > them some benefit I think they'll be convinced. But that message has to be > spread. This is true that many people do not realise how powerful GNUstep or Gorm can be, but to be fair to GNUstep, Cocoa has the same issues -- developers that never played with Cocoa do not think it's particularly good or bad. So showing off a bit some of the things (like Gorm) that do not really have an equivalent elsewhere is an ideal step to interest developers :) (and frankly, Gorm is underused compared to its potential -- we could have a lot of cool objects palettes adding interesting capabilities) -- Nicolas Roard _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
