Schedule proposal for the community days: http://wiki.maemo.org/Talk:Maemo_Summit_2009/Schedule
I basically followed the suggestions given here, more suggestions are welcome

Looks good! I would leave a 15 minute break after the lightning talks to split up the afternoon, but otherwise it's fine.

Dave.

Yeh, a coffee-break after the lightning talks is a good idea

*bump*

http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2009/09/10/frustration/

Re-posting here my proposals for alternatives:

This was discussed publicly months ago, see around http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...=summit&page=4 . That was the decision made by the organizers. I think the system itself works for the reasons given in that thread already.

BUT the system was proposed in a way that a proposal arriving before the deadline would have anyway chances to get in the schedule based on own merits. I firmly believe we need to stick to this basic principle, and see what can be done to address it even at this point. I’m happy to help being a bad cop if you want. At the end it was me who proposed the idea (that worked extremely well last year, let me remind you).

I can’t find the place now where I commented to the content committee (or at least Dave, around August I think) that perhaps they were going too fast filling the schedule. Yes, the Maemo 5 / N900 launch being in September didn’t help but you realize that those things are decided well over our heads.

You can blame Maemo Devices for not having sorted out before who were the Nokians with the travel to Amsterdam approved. Who was not extremely busy developing Maemo 5 was extremely busy organizing the launch.

Anyway, looking at the schedule I see that there are many things that can still be done:

- There is some people with 2 sessions. Sorry, choose one and blog about the other one.

- There are some sessions scheduled at 30′ and maybe their presenters would be happy anyway converting them to a lightning session.

- There are some sessions so specialized that probably they can be moved to the 4th room (25 people) without much problems.

- We can decide that this situation is exceptional, there is plenty of content pretty good and extend the Saturday and Sunday schedule 1h. If someone is tired at that time he or she can always go to the hotel or enjoy the city. Less generic and more specialized sessions can be moved there since we know that committed people will stay at that time.

- There might be even sessions that look too weak now that we are getting some last minute heavy-weights. No problem, if they refuse to move to a lightning session or a 4th room session we can keep the sponsorship to those speakers (if requested), have an extra shirt for them and also an extra apology.

Can be done. As said, if you need help I can help. If only by helping you accommodate the cools sessions landing these days, victims of travel approvals and NDAs.

Being practical, I propose to meet next Monday with the content committee in some calm IRC corner or even a conference call, go through the schedule and be done with it.

Yesterday I sent this suggestions to Dave and Jamie:

- Start Sunday keynote at 9:30 and add 3 more slots after the keynote;
- Reduce the number of LT's on Sunday(we don't have enough LT's in the queue in order to fill the empty slots) or move some to Saturday and add 3 slots before the closing talk;
- Reduce the closing talk to 15 minutes.

We can also move some specialized sessions to the BoF room, as Quim pointed above. About dismiss already approved sessions, I'm totally against that.

The 90' lunch breaks on Saturday/Sunday seem a bit unnecessarily long. They could be shortened to 60' and create 6 more slots in the community days. Alternatively, split the difference (75', same duration as on Friday) and move some lightning talks to Sunday for the same effect.

Agreed, or do we need to go out somewhere to find food and therefore need the time (even then an hour would be enough I'd have thought)?

No, there will be food in the same venue and there is a second alternative e.g. for people joining in the last minute in the very same WesterGasFabriek area.

Just to calm everyone down a bit... there *is* still space in the schedule - 6 empty slots to fill. And as Quim points out, there are double sessions that might get pared down to one, and potential extra space that we can use at the end of the day, or during lunchtime.

And as you can see on http://wiki.maemo.org/Talk:Maemo_Sum...09/Submissions we have considered already many of the proposals - of the 31 proposals outstanding, we've commented on 13 of them. So if we make another few slots (by proposing that some people switch to a smaller workshop, or merging sessions, or converting some full talks to lightning talks) there is space for another 5 or 6 proposals to be accepted.

There's no need to over-defend the concept of fill-as-you-go - the only issue was that when the Nokia day was filled very quickly, and we had lots of proposals for the community days, the schedule looked completely empty, so we were getting lots of negative feedback about the organisation of the community days. It was a natural reaction to want to reduce the queue of presentations awaiting an answer. Plus, we had no way of knowing how many "late" proposals would come in, which made things even trickier - what would we have looked like if we refused presentations, only to find ourselves with empty slots in the community days?

Cheers,
Dave.

One thing to reflect on in all the noise and bustle is that this sort of thing is a sign of success, and despite the frustration, we should all be happy over what the high level of interest and engagement signifies IMO.