[CREATE] Suggested dates for LGM 2009 Montreal

[Anders Brander]

Hi,

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 09:21 +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.

I'm not so interested in keeping small projects happy, I'm more
interested in keeping the listeners happy. As a listener I really
appreciate the very specialized and technical presentations and
discussions - besides the mainstream talks that most people enjoy.

Well, maybe I'm weird ;-)

/abrander