Re: Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2022 Call for Presentations/Participation/Lectures

[David Kastrup]

Jonas Hahnfeld via Discussions on LilyPond development
<lilypond-devel@gnu.org> writes:

> Am Mittwoch, dem 15.12.2021 um 23:44 +0100 schrieb David Kastrup:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> after the "big" Linuxtag event folded, the Chemnitzer Linuxtage are the
>> largest such event in Germany, typically drawing about 2500-3000
>> visitors each year.  In 2020, they were forced to fold with something
>> like a week of advance notice.  In 2021, the event was virtual.  In
>> 2022, this will again be the case.
>> 
>> They have turned the floor plan of the lecture hall building normally
>> used (the "Orangerie") into a walk-through game that opens up Jitsi
>> sessions at stands and meeting points and connects to Big Blue Button
>> sessions in the various lecture rooms.  The hallways are, as it was with
>> the in-person conference, set with project stands where vendors or free
>> software projects can present their projects and help users and other
>> interested people with their problems or their questions.
>> 
>> This would be an opportunity to set up a LilyPond stand, along with
>> posters, presentations and people manning the stand, without actually
>> involving traveling to Chemnitz.  Video conference capable hardware is
>> all that is required, as is a typical web browser.
>
> sorry for the late reply; I'd be willing to participate in the event
> and be present at the LilyPond stand. Let me know if you need
> something for the submission, if you haven't done so already.

Ok, I messed this one up.  Entry deadline is today.  The problem with
the stand is that it's sort of like a real stand: you need to do posters
and possibly other representation in advance in order to attract
visitors to engage (get close enough in the virtual walk to enter the
Jitsi video conference), you really need to have 3 or 4 minimum serving
the stand because a good part of the time personnel will be on standby
and/or just talking with one another and for 2 days you want to have
people available for passersby, the questions will not be interesting
programming questions or modern composers looking for the best of the
best but more in line of "how do I even set this up?"  or "I tried
entering stuff for my band and rather ended up using MuseScore" or "how
do I input MIDI to LilyPond" and so on.

And visitors will quite more often than not be German-language (since
many people return to this conference that know the people and
organisation and that means that its location in Germany does make quite
a difference even in this second virtual year), even though official
conference languages are both German and English.  So it might have made
more sense to look for volunteers in German-speaking forums but I don't
actually frequent those.

So what would be necessary today, if at all, is to conscript a few
people willing to do some of the leadup work and then serve at the
virtual stand on the conference date itself.  Without the number of
people actually able to do pretty much everything involved with a real
stand job apart from travel (and sadly, apart from participating with
the great "thank you" dinner that was customary for all active
participants with the in-person conferences), it would not make sense to
compete for the limited floor space.

Um, yeah, that's basically it.

Do we get there?

-- 
David Kastrup