GUADEC 2024 planning has begun and we need your help! Based on feedback from our GUADEC 2023 post-event survey we’ve had some interest in switching our regular talk days from weekdays to over the weekend and now we’d like to know which conference days work best for you. Would you be more likely to attend, either remotely or in person, if we move the talk days to Fri-Sun, or would you like them to remain during the week?
Let us know your preference by selecting an option on the poll*:
Talks during the week (Wed-Fri) and BoFs on the weekend (Sat-Sun)
Talks during the weekend (Fri-Sun) and BoFs during the week (Mon-Tues)
Either option works for me!
0voters
*Results are not final. We will use the responses on this poll combined with feedback from other sources to determine which days to use for GUADEC 2024 talks and BoFs.
Thanks for putting this poll out there! I heard different thoughts from a few people at GUADEC, so it’s great to be soliciting more feedback.
One thought that was shared (I forget by who! ) was: in organizing the schedule, we could aim to have more newcomer talks positioned on the weekend to try to attract folks from the local community, while keeping more technical talks or talks likely to be attended by folks traveling for work during the week. If it’s completely overlapping a weekend, something similar could be done for BoFs, too, giving locals/newcomers basically a two-day mini-conference of both talks and workshops:
Thu: Opening, bias towards technical/corporate-attended talks
Fri: Bias towards technical/corporate-attended talks
Sat: Newcomers/locals welcoming, bias towards newcomer-friendly talks
Sun: Newcomer-friendly BoF/workshops
Mon: Technical/planning BoFs/workshops
Tues: Social day
That of course adds yet another dimension to scheduling and planning, but I wonder if it’s something worth considering. And in looking at it, I don’t know if that’s any better or way worse…
Good that you’re thinking about this stuff - i think its very important to try and make the conference inclusive for folk who aren’t already contributing to GNOME; its also rather hard to know what to do.
I am not sure “corporate-attended” is a useful distinction here. Some folk attend with a corporate sponsorship but are completely new to GNOME - this happens with Codethink sometimes as myself and Javier convince our colleagues to use their conference allowance to attend GUADEC Meanwhile some of the most core GNOME contributors are contributing to GNOME outside of work hours, or are independently funded.
I think “for core contributors” and “for newcomers” may be the most useful way to divide it up. The same topic can be of interest to one or the other group depending on how it’s presented. For example a talk on the last 6 months of specific changes in GNOME design is more interesting to core contributors, as we have a lot of context to understand it. A similar talk but framed differently,putting the design into wider context could be more interesting to newcomers, even though it’s broadly the same topic.
Do you have some idea already about the demographics in Denver who might attend “non-core days” at GUADEC? e.g. students, open source hackers affiliated with other projects, professional developers ?
One thing we found useful in Manchester (maybe you’re way ahead of us on this one) was to host a GNOME release party in a local hackspace, which helped put us in touch with a surprising number of local open source heads that I hadn’t previously met.
) was: in organizing the schedule, we could aim to have more newcomer talks positioned on the weekend to try to attract folks from the local community, while keeping more technical talks or talks likely to be attended by folks traveling for work during the week. If it’s completely overlapping a weekend, something similar could be done for BoFs, too, giving locals/newcomers basically a two-day mini-conference of both talks and workshops:
Meanwhile some of the most core GNOME contributors are contributing to GNOME outside of work hours, or are independently funded.