: I would propose that we reserve the first presentation slot for an : overview of Lucene and short (2-5 minutes, one slide) introductions of : all the subprojects.
+1 ... we're up to 10 subprojects, so the first 50 minute block is perfect -- particularly since it's followed by a break to give people a chance to look at the whole con schedule and decide what talks they want to go to based on the summary of the projects. we should make sure each of those 2-5 minute summaries draw attention to all of the sessions that will be touching that subproject (a slide listing them while the speaker talks about what hte project is would probably be enough) : Beyond that I'd focus Lucene Java talks on one day and Solr talks on : the other, and sprinkle the other topics in between there. Hmmm... that's a tough call. ther's a lot of powering in having solid "tracks" for people to go to, but personally i think it's better to mix things up over multiple days so you cna benefit from word of mouth -- It sucks to meet up with some people for dinner, and hear about this cool session they went to that day where they heard about this awesome Project Y, and then find out that every session covering Y is over because they were all on that one day. Perhaps a better strategy would be to have the "no experience required" type talks (intro to X, tutorials for novice users, case studies, etc...) on thursday, and then on Friday do the more advanced talks where people are already expected to be fairly familiar with the projects (advanced X, performance tuning, new features in X, making X work with Y, etc...) (there typically tend to be more "intro" talks then "advanced" talks, but it's no big deal to also have an intro talk on friday, you just make it a topic that doesn't have a corrisponding advanced talk) : If scheduling gets tight, we could even combine the two slots at 16-18 : into a mini "Fast Feather Talk" session where we could do a series of : short 15 minute presentations of various things that wouldn't : necessarily fit in the normal schedule. fast feather or lightening talks can be cool -- but typically only when they are unscheduled and just involve people talking (with NO laptop setup ... *maybe* with a whiteboard) for no more then 5 minutes or so. there is a lot to be said however for combining some shorter talks -- four 30 minute talks, or two 45 minutes and one 30 minute -- provided the speakers all coordinate in advance (merge their slides into a single "deck", use only one computer so there's less setup overhead, do one joint round of introductions, have it listed on the schedule as one block so there's no 10 minute intermission, etc...) -Hoss
