Re: Desktop Summit Planning
On Tue, 13.12.11 21:42, Brian Cameron (brian.came...@oracle.com) wrote: Heya, 1. It subtracts momentum from the GNOME brand and community. With GNOME 3 to focus on, the community needs to more focus on making GNOME 3 a success, less on collaboration. I ran the paper committee in Berlin. While I was very happy with how this worked out and there was very little friction between the KDE and GNOME sides of the committee (the only real friction was between some folks outside of the committee and the committee, where the committee stood together very well), I must actually say that I am clearly against the combined conference, because I think it is not for the benefit of GNOME, simply on the grounds that the contents of the conference suffered by having to be fair towards the KDE side. Firstly, we received substantially more GNOME talks than KDE talks. Secondly, the GNOME talks got consistently better votings by both sides than the KDE talks. Nonetheless we had to be somewhat fair and accept a similar amount of KDE talks as GNOME talks. The result is that we had to refuse a number of good GNOME talks in favour of accepting a lot of less-than-ideal KDE talks. And honestly, that's something that made me very unhappy. Ultimately we did accept slightly more GNOME talks than KDE talks (thankfully nobody noticed, so that this didn't become a big political issue), but still I found it very sad that we had to accept some low-quality KDE talks at the expense of higher-quality GNOME talks. This is actually made worse by the fact that the focus of the desktop summit was even wider than GNOME and KDE, and we even included Enlightenment talks (and the CFP asked for even more), which in my eyes are even less in the interest of GNOME. I believe the focus of a conference should be on the talks, the actual contents of a conference, not on whether it makes the organization simpler or easier. If we are willing to compromise this much on the contents, then this hurts GNOME and makes the conference a lot less interesting to attendees, because attendees come for the talks, not for the flawless organization. I think GNOME should really think about what is good for itself, not how to keep the peace. Effectively, KDE has a lot more to gain from a combined conference than GNOME has, the benefits of a joined conferenced are very unbalanced. I strongly believe GNOME should focus on what is good for GNOME, and much less on what is good for whatever else exists in the Free Software world. Our interest should be GNOME, and making GNOME great, and not at all making KDE great too, and Enlightenment, and whatever else exists. I'd even go further than this: I believe one of the goals of GNOME should be to emphasize vertical integration (i.e. considering integration of our stack, the GNOME OS a core objective), but encouraging multiple variables on top of this stack makes that much more complex. I think it is against our interest encouraging KDE and other desktop environments. And again, I am saying this purely in regards to the contents of the conference, personally I believe the KDE folks in the paper committee and outside of it did a great job, and especially Mirko did an exceptionally good job in running the entire conference. 2. It is hard to measure what specific collaborative benefits are being made possible by the Desktop Summit. It is hard to point to specific advances that have been accomplished. Some have concerns that not a lot of collaboration is actually being done. Judging by the papers we got I must say that this is indeed a major concern. The talks I think were actrually really relevant to both sides, one could count on the fingers of one hand. They did definitely exist, and even though we officially gave about a third of the schedule to them I honestly believe only a tiny fraction of those which were officially cross-desktop really mattered to both sides. I am tempted to say that given that this is the way it is a one day cross-desktop miniconf thingy would have more than sufficed to handle these. The question of course is whether this one day needs to take place at the desktop summit, or whether a forum like FOSDEM (where the cross-project idea is much more emphasized) might not be the better place to organize this. 1. To not have a large combined GNOME+KDE event, and to instead have a smaller Desktop Summit or focused hackfest(s) with a more clear agenda to work on specific and measurable collaborative tasks. GUADEC and Akademy would continue as separate events. I think this would be best. I'd suggest to organize this collaboration event collocated to FOSDEM. 3. The GNOME community has been having trouble finding volunteers to help make events successful lately. Some people like Dave Neary, Lennart Poettering, and Ekaterina Gerasimova did a great job volunteering to make the last Desktop Summit a success. However, the fact that there were too few
Desktop Summit Program Committee
Heya! I just wanted to let everybody know that we have chosen the members of the paper committee for the Desktop Summit 2011. Note that this is going to be a single program committee for the entire conference, equally covering proposals originating from the GNOME side and from the KDE side of things (and evertyhing else that is submitted without any particular background). The people in the committee are: Emmanuele Bassi (Intel) Kevin Krammer (KDAB) Ryan Lortie (Codethink) Thiago Macieira (Nokia) Michael Meeks (Novell) Bastien Nocera (Red Hat) Celeste Lyn Paul (Academic) Lydia Pintscher (Academic) Lennart Poettering (Red Hat) Cody Russell (Canonical) Cornelius Schumacher (Novell) Aaron Seigo (Nokia) Yes, 12 people are a lot. It was our intention to make sure that we always have a few people in the committee who know a particular field particularly well. We do not expect everybody on this list to vote on every proposal. Six have been chosen from the GNOME side, and six from the KDE side. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Berlin Desktop Summit 2011 proposal
On Thu, 08.07.10 10:02, Michael Meeks (michael.me...@novell.com) wrote: On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 21:02 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: It might be generally useful to do something to help GNOME contributors meet up based on where they live. We do so much in cyberspace, in which a person's geographical location is irrelevant, that come the day when geographical location does matter, we don't know which of our physical neighbors are actually with us. Agreed; despite not having the initiative to do this myself - I greatly appreciated the Gnome UK beer events organised by Rob: Note that we actually had a Gnome gettogether last year or so in Berlin (I announced it on p.g.o. Some people showed up, but I wouldn't call it the greatest success). Maybe we should give it another try, anyone? (jhs?) Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals
On Thu, 03.07.08 23:09, Dave Neary ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: These two are equally well fulfilled in A Coruna. Yes, they are. The thing with Coruna ist however, that because it is not a top tourist destination you won't get cheap charter flights. 2. The conference tourist that I am would prefer to go to the Canary Islands, it's way more interesting from a tourtistic pov than the other two suggestions. This seems like the only argument specific to Gran Canaria, and doesn't seem to me like a very good reason. In fact, it's *exactly* the reason that I cited when arguing *against* Gran Canaria. Since it's a tourist destination, I think convincing sponsors will be more difficult (bear in mind that on your money arguments, cheap flights mean we can bring more people for free/cheap). Uh? Scientific conferences happen at nice spots all the time. That's how conferences work. And with non-scientific conferences it is not that different. I think it is very far fetched to assume that moving the conference to a not-so-nice place will attract any additional sponsoring. That's outright a ridiculous assumption. Do you really think the position of GNOME is so weak that someone who might want to sponsor GUADEC thinks that the community having a good time could be detrimental to what the outcome of the project? Come on! Sorry, but this argument of yours is nonsense. The fact that Gran Canaria is a touristy place makes thing cheaper, brings infrastructure. And that's two things we need for a good conference. Lennart -- Lennart PoetteringRed Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net ICQ# 11060553 http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals
On Thu, 03.07.08 20:54, Quim Gil ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 6:30 PM, Lennart Poettering [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are there even any direct flights to Tampere, except from HEL? Ryanair in Tampere operates to Frankfurt, London, Bremen, Dublin, Milan and to Riga. Blue 1 operates to Stockholm and Copenhagen. Still no comparison to charter trips. Food, at http://www.gnome.org/~behdad/akademy+guadec-2009-bids/finland/ there is a list of restaurants with many options starting from meals at 5€. Remember that Tampere is a city full of (public) university students, including Erasmus from all Europe. 5€ is a competitive price in the Spanish Summer, specially in the coast. Coping with parties every night is a problem for the economy of many. This was raised in previous editions and should be taken into account next year, no matter where. 3 sponsored social events with drinks reasonably covered + a couple of nights covered by a visit to the supermarket + a couple of nights actually sleeping well and drinking very healty water... Sounds like a plan? I somehow doubt that this works out. It didn't in Birmingham: some people went out all the time because they had no problems affording it in Birmingham -- Some people had to focus more on living from Tesco. Claiming that this was a good solution is, uh, not really understandable to me. Anyway. I think I am not the right one to fight for all the oppressed and disadvantaged who might want to come to GUADEC. So let's stop the money discussion here. Just one last thing: I just think it is not the right sign to move the conference to the country with the third highest cost of living in Europe, after has already been in Norway (which is the country with the highest cost of living) two years ago. (We should move it to Switzerland in 2010, then we'd have had it in all three most expensive countries. Yay! -- that ranking is from ECA International, some study I justed googled) Lennart -- Lennart PoetteringRed Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net ICQ# 11060553 http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
