Hi, > I wanted to have an opinion on an idea I've been playing for a while. > I'd like to run some -not so big- conference around here in Perú. > Obviously one of the goals of doing so is promoting GNOME events > outside the north hemisphere of our lovely planet.
Yeah! Viva a América do Sul! > One of the obvious problems with the will of taking people from Europe > to SouthAmerica is that ticket cost is high. Discussing the idea with > various people, an idea popped: sync conferences of this side of the > world so people travelling from europe can assist easily to other > conferences in other countries, this would be simple masses economy > (if that's the translation). > Example: > - GNOME Chile decides to have a conference March 15-17, they want to > bring Lucas for a talk about Maemo > - GNOME Brasil wants to have Lucas on March 20 > - GNOME Perú would like to have a conference on March 22-24, and would > like Lucas as a speaker for March 23. Does it mean that I'll be in Chile, Brazil and Peru next year!? Woohoo! Sorry, I couldn't help it. :-P > The idea is simple, just agree on some schedule so we have the chance > of sharing the availability of speakers or attendants. > This of course raises problems like outside-of-office time for these > guys and other things like lots of travelling, but SouthAmerica is not > huge, it's easy to go from one place to another. Yes, it can be really hard to argue with an employer about being more than 1 week out of office just to participate on conferences. But this is a case-by-case thing: it depends on the who, when, what and where. > Benefit for the local people is having some cool speakers for a lot > less money than normal (or maybe even for almost no money?), benefit > for speakers is that they get to travel around SouthAmerica. Indeed. I would just add that this would be really nice for the Board too because it would be a very effective investment to sponsor 2-3 GNOME events at once with relatively lower costs (specially for flight tickets). > I would like to hear your opinions on this idea, or any opinion about > the whole issue of bringing more people to our part of the world!. I like the idea. Actually, I don't think you need any opinion from Marketing team in order to push this forward[1]. I suggest you to contact chileans and brazilians to know their opinion about this conference schedule syncing (which might be tricky btw). Next step would be to agree on a list of potential/wanted "gringo" speakers. I can help you with the brazilian contacts. Feel free to contact the Board to help you on this when/if you have a more concrete proposal. --lucasr [1] It's nice that you've posted your ideas here though because other people might be having similar ideas for the same issues. -- marketing-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
