On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 03:39:50PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Similarly, the conference is created around what the attendees find interesting. Even if the synopsis is very accurate and detailed, if
I was talking to Dmitri Pal (from FreeIPA) at LISA, and he suggested that rather than having people vote on individual talks, we could have people propose _topics_, and then we'd have a community-wide vote on those - separate from specific speakers or talks. From that, we could have a "skeletal" schedule of tracks and talks in certain areas. Then, we could have interested/knowledgeable people in each selected topic fill that out... maybe provide an ordered list of recommended talks/sessions, which would go to the Flock committee for final selection.
I'm not understanding how this works. The community would propose things they are interested in hearing about, a vote would be held, and the results would show topic areas of interest. But then what happens if we don't have any speakers to provide talks for those? Or even if we do have speakers, the workload on the staff isn't reduced at all. The have to vet the topics and results and then vet the talks and speakers anyway.
It sounds confusing.
I'm opposed to setting aside space for newcomers. I'm skeptical about allowing speaker identity in the votes, but not strictly opposed. Frankly, I'd like to see a major reduction in _talks_ overall. Perhaps one day of them, with the remainder of Flock being focused on _doing_ things. If that happens, then competition for talk slots is going to be higher.
I'm in support of few talks with higher attendance. The one complaint I got from a couple of people about the last Flock is that they didn't get the audience they expected. I also like "more doing things", but I don't want the proven success of pre-planned sessions from Flock the last couple of years to fall back into the less-productive chaos we were seeing at FUDCon.
Right, I don't want barcamp. I want less talks, but still pre-planned talks and schedule.
josh