I found the GUADEC 2023 to be managed well overall.
Pros:
Video / Audio were of good quality.
Topics were good, very relevant and informative.
Topic presenters were excellent.
Time for the talks was managed well.
Moderator was very clear in her messages.
Cons:
Videos uploaded to YouTube should have been trimmed to individual talks ( not 6-7 hour videos for 6 sessions ). With topic specific videos, users can ask questions relevant to the topic of the video. If not for happieplantnl YouTube user ( in GUADEC 2023 - YouTube video links to talks ), I wouldn’t have watched the videos at all to be honest. Cassidy has worked on this in Individual talk recordings - GUADEC 2023. I think we should expand on his work, and address this issue in the next GUADEC.
There were few audio related issues. In the first few minutes of the GUADEC ( Opening Remarks by Robert McQueen ), audio volume was very low. It was corrected within a few minutes, which was good. Hope this doesn’t happen in the next GUADEC.
When the talks were in progress, there were noise of chairs screeching ( and it was louder too ). Would be better if we consciously managed the mikes used in the room, and switch off when not in use.
I’m not exactly sure as to what was the difficulty faced by those who helped the presenters to get their presentations on the laptop in the dias, but sometimes it was taking too much time. Is this something which can be addressed ?
The questioner ask his / her question without a mike, and the presenter has to repeat the same question ( and sometimes this gets missed too ). It would be great if we can arrange extra mikes, and inform the physical audience to always use them.
I noticed MS Windows was used in some presentations. Any reason why this was the case ?
Also, a GitLab link to raise GUADEC specific issues / feedback in the YouTube video descriptions would be helpful.
The audio-video setup provided by the venue used Windows; in general, it’s easier to put the slides on a machine that is known to work with the AV setup, rather than plugging a random laptop and hoping it’ll work: you waste time, and end up eating into the presentation slot, causing a cascade of delays.
GNOME was used by presenters too and it worked fine without any issues.
I have used GNOME for presentations for a long time, and I haven’t faced any issues. It’s just video data has to be redirected to the output port ( VGA / DVI / HDMI etc. ), and it happens to be the projector in this case, but the same code path applies to external monitors as well, which is a prominent daily use case for lots of GNOME users.
I’m sure it did—after all, I was there; but it’s not really something you can count on, which is why the GUADEC team asked every presenter to prepare their slides on a removable storage device, and to communicate in advance if they needed to use their own laptop for things like audio and video, or custom presentation software.
A/V setups can be finicky, and you can’t know that in advance. Discovering that you need to plug your laptop in order to have the USB-C/HDMI adapter to work properly, for instance, is not a fun experience to have when you have less than 5 minutes to set up your presentation; it’s also not fun to figure out the proper resolution of the projector in order to make the presentation appear with the correct size.
This isn’t presenting a lecture, where you have time to set up your machine and tweak the output. It’s a conference with a schedule, and you cannot inconvenience every other presenter.
Just setup a laptop with GNOME once and tell everyone to use it. It’s just a question of whether the default laptop in the dias has Windows or GNOME, not whether everyone should use the dias laptop or their own laptops.