[CREATE] Suggested dates for LGM 2009 Montreal

[Jon Phillips]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 09:21 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Anders Brander wrote:
> > On Sat, 2008-11-08 at 13:18 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> >> I don't think that most people are there for the presentations, so I
> >> don't think "packing out" the schedule is important. It's important in
> >> conferences where attendees pay a lot of money to go, and need to
> >> justify the expense to their bosses by pointing out all the great
> >> content that's scheduled. We're not in that situation.
> > 
> > Well. We shouldn't have lots of presentations, with the sole purpose of
> > selling the idea to our bosses. But; I don't see why we should avoid
> > people talking about their small and specialized projects. Some of the
> > talks I enjoyed most at LGM2008 were some of the very specialized talks.
> 
> Lightning talks! This is exactly the format small specialised projects
> need - you get 5 minutes (an eternity!) to present what your project is,
> some of the cool stuff people do with it, and what you're interested in
> getting at the conference (Users? Hackers? Features? Feedback?)
> 
> The additional advantage of lightning talks is that you can do say 2
> hours of them, and have 25 presentations, thus keeping lots of those
> small projects happy. A third advantage: if one comes along that few
> people are interested in, it's like the commercial break, they'll stick
> around & watch it anyway, because in 5 minutes there's another one coming.
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave.

Totally.

Louis, at the end of the day, you are organizing this, but in the end we
have to ask ourselves what we our communities are getting out of this:

1.) collaboration time specific to our projects
2.) collaboration time between projects
3.) presenting to all about these collaborations
4.) discovering new projects


And, I would rank our conference priorities in that order and time usage
that way. So, I wonder if we can do that:

day 1: collaborate within our projects
day 2: presentations from major projects, set talks
day 3: more presentations about collaboration, major talks + lightning
talks
day 4: collaboration unconference day

But, I still really think that day 4 could be integrated into day 3.

As I said, Louis, you are taking on the big burden, and you have done
this before so you know what you are doing...just giving my few
cents/eurocents...

Jon

-- 
Jon Phillips
San Francisco, CA + Guangzhou + Beijing
GLOBAL +1.415.830.3884
CHINA +86.1.360.282.8624
jon at rejon.org
http://www.rejon.org
IM/skype: kidproto
Jabber: rejon at gristle.org
IRC: rejon at irc.freenode.net