[maemo-community] Organizing Maemo Summit 2009

[From: Benson Mitchell]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 8:46 PM, Jamie Bennett <jamie at linuxuk.org> wrote:
>
> 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.

I hope this wasn't a surprise; given that the conference is in Europe,
and from what I understand of the affordability of traveling in
Europe, I'd expect a far greater fraction of potential attendees from
Europe would be able to make it. I'm not saying there are more Maemo
users/devs/whatever in the US, or even that the numbers are equal; I'm
only saying the only way I can see Europeans not being an
"overwhelming proportion" would be if the US-based proportion was so
large this question would not even be discussed.

Obviously we each have our biases (I'm American, in case you couldn't
guess, and would like it to be here), but I do think the notion of
having the summit in the US 1 in 2 years, 1 in 3, or some such, seems
proportional and useful. Once we have one in the US, there would at
least be more attendance data to compare, which could help determine
the appropriate duty cycle.

> > 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.

I think it should either be some time (a month or so) after devices
hit shelves, or have a big announcement at the summit. Big
announcement ideas: maybe final SDK release, maybe even hand out the
early developer hardware to the early developers. Can't do that
probably; how do you hand brown-paper bags with top-secret hardware
out at a public conference and expect NDAs to be respected over drinks
that night? Maybe even the actual product launch, where "launch" means
bring your $500 or equivalent plastic and buy one at the Nokia shop
down the street (in Europe; since we don't have Nokia stores in the
US, they'd have to sell them out of the back of a truck) over lunch
break the first day? Better still, if hard to do, that, without
letting anyone know ahead of time:
<Some Nokia person doing a presentation about Fremantle, but demoing
it on the new hardware.>
Winding down at the end, maybe even _after_ questions: "Oh, and by the
way folks, there's 1000 of these in stock at the Nokia store down the
street."
<Masses of innocent civilians trampled to death in the ensuing rush.>

For a 'before announcement' summit, without any info dumped in the
summit, or new community-side experience with the new platform, I
don't see the point, and I also don't see much point to artificially
holding off any "official announcement" after the summit -- just dump
all information that's to be made public in one big event for maximum
impact, and to hype next year's summit...

But since I expect it will be in the Fall again, Fremantle and the
RX-51 should be well out by then. OTOH, maybe a Harmattan announcement
could be in the works, or maybe a new, different, Fremantle device...
>
> > 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.

I don't know, as I wasn't hanging out on #maemo last year, but I'd be
surprised if there wasn't a ton of IRC activity from the conference,
too. I'm working on getting irssi set up with nice coloring and such,
largely in anticipation of this. (Whether I'm attending or just
listening in...) Perhaps a list in the wiki of all the planned live
coverage would be helpful...

> > 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.

Well, I like the idea of live streaming, but between timezones,
work/school, and the technical difficulties, it doesn't always work
out, and proper live-stream coverage generally involves ad-hoc panning
or wide-angle to catch both the presenter and their slides, where good
footage for release would involve one or two cameras on the presenter,
and slide capture via a camera, video capture, or just getting a copy,
so it's a lot of work with little overlap. Perhaps the most useful
compromise: have it filmed with the intent of cooking clean
recordings, but with the raw video (and their slide files, as-is or
_maybe_ with simple format conversions, if slides aren't videoed)
bittorrented right after each talk, or at least nightly. (Then
processing could take a week or two before final release.) That should
involve almost no extra effort vs. making the clean recordings only,
but still allow non-attendees to keep up with the talks.



Benson