[maemo-community] Organizing Maemo Summit 2009

[From: Jamie Bennett]

On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 17:56 +0100, Andrea Grandi wrote:
> 1. Country and city
> 
> Where is the Maemo community located? I mean: where do the most of
> people come from? Are there more american or european? I think this is
> an important factor to evaluate when they have to choose where to
> organize the summit.

We had this discussion at the last summit and the consensus was that an
overwhelming proportion of attendee's were based in Europe.

> 2. The place
> 
> I think it's important to find a place like C-base for the next Maemo
> summit. We are an open community and a place like that is very
> comfortable and interesting for us geeks, developers and Maemo fans.

C-Base was great, finding an equally good site will be tough; a job that
I wouldn't like to undertake.

> 3. Contents
> 
> What should a summit offer to community? We should encourage knowledge
> exchange in every kind of way: organizing small conferences and a lot
> of light talks (they were one of the most interesting things in the
> summit), create little groups of discussion (for example, 10-15 people
> choose a subject and meet in a room to discuss it directly) ecc... and
> the most important thing: we should ask the community what they expect
> to find in a summit.

I expect a lot of the talks will be centered around Fremantle but
obviously there will be a need for small BOF's and talks on the
peripheral components of Fremantle. I would like to see mix of these
smaller groups with the larger, product announcements and Nokia produced
talks. The format last time seemed to work well.

> 5. When?
> 
> When should we organize the summit? Before a big release (like
> Freemantle), just after the final release or after some months of
> development with it? I don't remember exactly when the final release of
> Freemantle is scheduled for, but I think that next September would be
> a nice period... what do you think about?

I would prefer a 'before announcement' summit, one that is held a month
or so before the official release. That way we get the excitement from
the summit coverage generating product anticipation within the wider
community and beyond.

> 6. Live blogging
> 
> I think it would be great if someone (at least 2-3 people) would blog,
> post picture ecc... in real time while the summit is going on.

There were a couple of us doing this last time, Ryan Paul, Thoughtfix,
me among others. From looking at my website traffic from that week I see
this as an important element of the summit.

> 7. Live streaming
> 
> We could use something like ustream.tv or justin.tv to offer a live
> audio/video streaming
> of the summit (conferences, light talks ecc...). So people that cannot
> join directly can
> follow the summit from their home.

I'm not so sure about live streaming. I usually prefer recorded talks
that have had a little post-processing and polishing, crud removed and
augmented with slides.

> p.s: sorry for my poor english :\

No need to apologise, your English is fine :)

Regards,
Jamie
--
http://www.linuxuk.org