FOSDEM Aftermath - the Dev-Room

[Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf]

Having a Dev-Room has paid of a lot IMHO, since it creates much more  
intense contacts and lively interest than just those "stop-two- 
seconds-for-a-flyer-and-ask-or-say-nothing" situations you usually  
have at a booth/stand. So I would consider having a Dev-Room much  
more important than having just a stand. And a stand also means more  
stuff to bring (computers/montitors to display GNUstep, banners,  
posters, booklets/brochures/flyers or other merchandising like  
buttons, T-shirts, Live-CDs, cups, stuffed animals … ;-)).

Teaming up seems to ease getting a Dev-Room (this year it was not  
just the GNUstep Dev-Room but the GNUstep+Etoilé+OpenGroupware.org  
Dev-Room). I'd do it the same in the future (given of course that  
Etoilé and OpenGroupware.org don't feel usurped this way)

The size of the Dev-Room was just right (31 seats), it wasn't to  
large so that it felt empty but sometimes all places were taken and  
some people had to stand in the aisles.

The time scheduled for the sessions (one hour each) was also just  
right, most talks were finished after about 45 minutes and there was  
still enough time to ask questions and get ready for the next  
session. Having a lunch break on sunday was also just right (sessions  
on saturday started at 13:00 hours so there was no need for a lunch  
break then).


But of course there's still room to improve:

- I like the idea of having a moderator as Sebastian suggested.

- As Riccardo says: "The developer room unfortunately doesn't leave  
much space for communication and hacking, since the stream of talk is  
pretty much continuous." and Nicolas did second: There was nearly no  
time for "internal" talks, that means talks or discussions during  
which GNUstep developers itself talked to each other. While I am all  
for a presentation and "show and tell" kind of Dev-Room (since this  
is one of the rare occasions where we can get into personal contact  
with our users and future users) talking to each other shouldn't be  
missed out (since FOSDEM is also one of the rare occasions where we  
meet each other) I have several ideas for this:

a.) having internal talks in the early sunday hours (9:00 to 11:00  
when everybody recovers from saturday night). Pro: we won't miss a  
large audience (since they're most likely still sleeping). Contra:  
The most GNUsteppers were also not in the Dev-Room until 11 am to 12  
am (recovering from the saturday night dinner I guess

b.) having open (moderated) talks on a topic (with audience). I have  
no idea if this will work. Most likely it is difficult to define  
topics (for the FOSDEM schedule) before and I doubt it will be very  
efficient. Helge was holding a BOF (birds of a feather) talk for  
GroupDAV/CalDAV Implementors and during this several other small,  
fluctuating groups were discussing several aspects of GNUstep. So it  
turned out to be a general BOF for different aspects of GNUstep  
(don't ask me about all the topics that have been discussed during  
this). I guess that discussions are more productive in such an  
informal kind of setting. But such a setting is not very inviting for  
outsiders, they'll only see small groups of people standing around  
and will have a difficult time to join.

c.) doing it all a day earlier, on friday in the hotel (breakfast  
room or the like). Quite good time and place to do so since then  
we're undisturbed. But this would require staying in Brussels a day  
longer (arriving ideally already thursday evening) which cost more  
time and money and you may have to take a day off if you got a day  
job. Ideally we then also have to stay in the same place to avoid  
needless "getting around and find the others"-mumbo-jumbo.

d.) Having more meetings beside FOSDEM. I for instance have nice  
memories of the Alpenstep meeting. Let's have that again.


And in the end some organizational notes for the future

stuff which is nice to have for the Dev-Room:

- feedback sheets where attendees of the talks can rate the talks  
would be a good idea I think
- power cords with multiple plugs
- adaptors, adaptors, adaptors. Don't forget those. For power (every  
european country has still its own "standard") and to plug your  
laptop into the projector. Richard had to go to the Apple Store to  
get one (since he forgot to bring his) and sadly this adaptor was  
useless in the end since the projectors didn't came with a DVI-input.
- one or two Ethernet hubs/switches are useful. FOSDEM did provide  
WLAN in each room but they didn't got it to work reliably until late  
Saturday afternoon.
- loudspeakers (for video conferences or sound in the presentations)
- an own projector (FOSDEM does provide some but you never know what  
you'll get, the first day we had one with a resolution of only  
800x600 and a somewhat broken keystone)
- If you're going to record the sessions on video, a small digicam  
should be sufficient. Be sure to have at least two batteries (so you  
can charge one while using the other) and two memory card (one to  
record while saving the contents of the other onto your laptop). You  
also need a small tripod (which can be used on desk - I brought my  
gorillapod http://joby.com/products/gorillapod/2 ). Recording in  
320x240 @ 15fps is the absolute minimum to get somewhat usable video  
(this is what I did since my digicam allows only for 2GB SD Cards  
which gave me about 70 to 80 mins recording time) but don't forget  
that the slides are unreadable at that resolution (even at 640x480 it  
will be hard to read slides projected at a higher resolution than  
1024x768)
- a clip microphone to record the speaker would increase the sound  
quality of the recorded speech by a magnitude
- a printer would also be nice (to print brochures/flyers or  
announcement of last minute talks ;-) but then again there ought to  
be a b/w laser printer at the front desk (and they let you print  
stuff if you're friendly and come with a PDF ready to print on an USB  
stick)


My conclusions:

- having a Dev-Room is more important than having a booth since we  
get more intense contact. A booth would be a nice addition if we are  
enough people (but it cost also a magnitude more of effort and  
organisation and splits us up in two groups)
- we should grant ourselves more opportunity for talking to each  
other. Whether we do this in the Dev-Room (and having less talks this  
way) or on friday in the hotel has to be discussed.
- Let's have another Alpenstep in late August (it was really nice then)!

what do you think?


thanks,

        Lars