[maemo-community] Organizing Maemo Summit 2009

[From: Ryan Abel]

On Feb 9, 2009, at 6:40 PM, Benson Mitchell wrote:

> 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.


Very few people outside of Europe were offered subsidized travel (only  
the "rockstars" as Quim put it) since travel between the rest of the  
world and Europe is much more expensive than inter-Europe travel. Very  
few people were subsidized and very few others could afford to pay  
their own way, so _of course_ you'll see a significant number of  
Europeans at a Europeans conference that is expensive and difficult  
for non-Europeans to get to. ;)

I'm very much in agreement with Benson here, we need non-European  
Summits every so often to keep things fair and have as large a portion  
of the community as possible attend at least one. Now, is this the  
year to have the Summit outside of Europe? I don't know, but I don't  
think the option should be dismissed out of hand based on such suspect  
statistics gathering. ;)

I think latching on to a large open source conference of some kind is  
a good way to go. It increases our potential attendance both with  
spillover from the main conference and increased incentive for Maemo- 
people, it may also reduce costs for a lot of people if they're  
already planning on travelling to the main conference.

--
Ryan Abel
Maemo Community Council chair