Re: Free Desktop Communities come together at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

On 08/12/2009 09:22 AM, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
Maybe if the foundation's board would more clearly articulate why
exactly we can't do a co-located event*next*  year, they'll convince the
community about their decision? Why didn't they?

My personal view as a board member:

Individual board members talked to various people to get a sense of what people are concerned about. For me, for example, I was personally very excited about the event and almost everyone I talked to wanted to see us doing it again next year. Given the survey results, seems like I'm only connected to about 55% of the community ;-).

So, we knew that a slight majority of the community wants to do it again next year, but there is also a non-negligible part that prefers to not do it again next year, perhaps do again the year after or whenever else it seems appropriate.

Then we have to consider the logistics of doing it. It's no unknown fact that running GUADEC is a HARD task. What's not very widely known is running a co-located event is *even* harder. If we keep doing it, we eventually will gain from learning by doing and only then can start to see positive returns to scale, but in the short term, say next year, the total experience would have been inferior to a non-colocated event.

Let me rephrase it. This is what I said on the board call: I don't see us (on the GNOME side) putting a lot more effort on the event next year, so I don't think we will fix most issues with this year's event. So I'd rather we do a Rocking GUADEC instead, give us some more time to get closer to KDE by doing smaller events, and hopefully do a joint event later when we have a closer working relationship.

It's not to say that the event this year didn't really rock. It did. But the GNOME scheduling for example, was inferior to any GUADEC I've seen.
(Yes, I can be blamed for that.)

