Re: What is GUADEC?

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 00:19 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> For 1/2 the cost, we could run summit-style (low-cost, high-fun)
> events on every continent (including a big one in Europe as the
> 'mother ship'), and for 1/4 the cost, we could send a handful of GNOME
> community leaders to every major free software conference to hold a
> 'linux desktop day' for local government and business leaders, having
> a much better impact on them than we do at GUADEC currently*- imagine
> the impact of Miguel in a room with 30 business and government leaders
> in a room designed for 30 leaders, instead of a 9/10ths empty room for
> 300; imagine (since we only rented a room for 30) being able to afford
> to do that in Canada, and Germany, and India, and Australia- all of
> which have major free software conferences who would be more than
> happy to help us set up such a day. And with the 1/4 left over we
> could do all kinds of interesting outreach things- hacker days at very
> tech-oriented free software conferences to bring in new blood;
> interesting marketing materials for small local conferences to spread
> the word about things like FOG and gnome-love; liveCDs sent to every
> major technology news outlet; training days for businesses and
> deployers at things like LWE- the list is very long.
> 
> Anyway... I'm glad this discussion has come out into the open. I've
> been saying some of these things at board meetings for some time now
> and it has not impacted the organization of the past two GUADECs;
> maybe this time something will change.
> 
> Luis (who was thrown off guadec-planning@, probably by accident, but
> thinks that maybe staying off of it will lengthen his lifespan)

Firmly agree with all of this. Let's not forget that we're a relatively
*small* project. We don't have a lot of money to play around with, so we
really need to focus it on where it makes sense to do so. We don't have
the luxury of anything more right now - I'd hope that would change with
time, but right now we should have a very clear budget, with very clear
intentions of where we need to be spending that money.

FWIW, I left the guadec-planning gnome alias because I got so sick of
everyone having different opinions of where we wanted to take GUADEC. I
don't have time for endless discussion - I just want to get things done.
After 6 relatively successful events, don't you think we should have
figured where we want to go by now?


Glynn