Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

The venue looks superb. Lets hope its nice weather so we can take advantage of the open spaces outside.

Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

Hi Quim,

This sounds great! A few questions that probably need resolving before we get started on community content are:

• How do we select content? will the council do it, will there be some kind of Summit presentations committee? If so, how will it get chosen?
• Timeline: Summer is almost upon us and with Summer holidays typically being in July in Finland, we will need to get a move-on with the call for papers.
• Infrastructure: How will we manage collecting presentation proposals? A mailing list, submissions in the wiki, a Midgard module, or some other specialised solution? If we're going for the low-tech solution, the workload for the papers committee will be greater, and the risk of error (an overlooked proposal, or an error in transcribing) is higher, but if we go for some kind of conference infrastructure, it will take time to set up.
• Talk formats: This will decide how many talk slots are available - how long will talks be? With what breaks? How many talk slots will there be in the day?

I mived the draft schedule and a bunch of other schedule related questions to http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009/Schedule in the wiki to try to keep the main page cleaner.

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

I'd say people should add their name, a proposed talk title, short description and a presentation length to the wiki. Far easier to keep track of all the proposals that way than having to trawl through either a mailing list or the forum.

I should add that once we know what sorts of talks people want to do, it should be easier to plan the structure of the day, numbers of talks, sessions (depending on the number of topics and how they could be streamed), etc.

Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

Managing potentially dozens of proposals in the wiki doesn't sound easy to me.

Ideally, we would have a situation where each proposal is 1 page, and we have a summary with presenter/title and the one line summary linking to the proposal. But getting people submitting proposals to respect posting guidelines is difficult.

I agree, we should be flexible & see what comes out of the call for content - but we have time & space limits which we should be aware of. Let's say we're working with 40 minute presentations, with 5 minutes break between each one, and a half an hour morning break and half an hour afternoon break, and a 1.5 hour lunch. You end up with

09:00 - 09:45: Presentation 1
09:45 - 10:30: Presentation 2
10:30 - 11:00: BREAK
11:00 - 11:45: Presentation 3
11:45 - 12:30: Presentation 4
12:30 - 14:00: LUNCH
14:00 - 14:45: Presentation 5
14:45 - 15:30: Presentation 6
15:30 - 16:00: BREAK
16:00 - 16:45: Presentation 7
16:45 - 17:30: Presentation 8

End of day

So we have 24 presentation slots per day, max.

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

Don't forget the lightning talks :) .

By your assumptions, I see that you are pointing for 3 tracks at the same time. For a small audience (yes, 300 persons is a small audience) the schedule should be carefully done, probably the rooms should be divide by intended audience (developers/power users/users...), instead of the usual themes/areas (desktop/multimedia...). We can't make everyone happy, but trying to avoid very related presentations at the same time should be a good start, people usually get pissed when they have two presentations at the same time, that they like to attend. As participants, some of you already experienced that situation for sure :) .

About the call for papers, I don't know the amount of submissions that you are expecting, but agree that the wiki isn't the best option to organize it.

How was it done in the 2008 summit ?

Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

Indeed - these should have 1 or 2 sessions with no competition.

Makes sense.

Very tricky to do. It's easy not to put two Mer presentations at the same time, not so easy to please people who are interested both in application development and developing the platform, say.

The wiki. Quim can speak to how easy/hard it was to organise.

Dave.

Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

Also don't forget to leave 5 minutes between talks as the talks are split over different venues. Moving from one building to another should be taken into consideration.

Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

Quim,
can you comment about the distance between the 3 rooms ?

Exist a inside pathway between them or you need to go outside to switch between rooms ?

Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

Thus my suggestion 40 mins + 5 mins break...

Dave.

Re: Maemo Summit dates and venue!
 

Last year we used the wiki and actually presenters and organizers were happy about the system. If we go for something different at least it would be good to know what problems found last year are you trying to address.

Three tracks, yes. What about thinking by default on users (big room), app developers (medium) and platform developers (small). We can always adapt for specific cases.

Lightning sessions with everybody in the room are proven to be successful and are also a way to canalize presentations that didn't make it as own sessions.

We can also think about 2-4 keynote sessions in the two community days. If we have speakers with the guts, the skills and the content.

The medium and small rooms are next to each other with a common door from the outside. The big room is 1 minute away walking a straight line in the park. No crossing streets or anything.