[qgil]

This is the initial team in charge of the organization of the MeeGo Conference 2010:

* Coordination: Dawn Foster and Quim Gil.
* Logistics: Amy Leeland coordinates. Specific areas and people in charge to be listed below.
o Specific areas go here.
* Content committee: Dirk Hohndel (coordination), Thiago Macieira, Michael Meeks and Carsten Munk.

Source: http://wiki.meego.com/MeeGo_Summit_2010#Team

Here you can already see a good bunch of people with experience organizing free community events focusing in free software and related topics. The area that needs to grow is Logistics. Amy has already an idea of the main areas and will update that soon.

Needless to say, Logistics is where most of the attention and work needs to go. Helping hands are welcome!

About the content committee, a first key task is to define the structure of the program. Many of us has opinions on what works and what doesn't so much nowadays in our online world when it comes to community events and conferences in general. Brilliant ideas welcome as well.

We have the precedents of the Maemo Summit, the Moblin Summit and many other events where we have been involved. Let's bring the lessons learned and let's organize something better!

[texrat]

I'll once again volunteer to do badges. I got some encouraging feedback from the ones I did for Maemo Summit 2009.

(in fact I've already started)

[dneary]

Hi,

Originally Posted by qgil

Here you can already see a good bunch of people with experience organizing free community events focusing in free software and related topics. The area that needs to grow is Logistics. Amy has already an idea of the main areas and will update that soon.

As I mentioned to Dawn in San Francisco, I'd be happy to help where I'm wanted in the MeeGo conference organisation. I've got a bit of a past in event organisation & would be happy to put it at the service of a great conference.

If I'm asked to help with something I don't know anything about, I'll say so, and do my best to get up to speed

Needless to say, Logistics is where most of the attention and work needs to go. Helping hands are welcome!

About the content committee, a first key task is to define the structure of the program. Many of us has opinions on what works and what doesn't so much nowadays in our online world when it comes to community events and conferences in general. Brilliant ideas welcome as well.

For the content, I think that what we did last year didn't work so well, so some clearer guidelines about content selection might be needed It's really difficult to decide as presentations come in what to choose and what not to choose, since you don't know how many last-minute proposals you're going to get.

I always recommend a smaller number of presentations, with a higher quality, if possible. There is a lot of work involved in arm-twisting presenters to prepare well their presentations, but it's worth it.
Lightning talks worked well last year, and I'd like to see the experience repeated if possible.


I don't know what kinds of ideas you've had already for evening sessions. One of the things I like in conferences are when the down times are entertaining as well as relaxing - I'd really like to see us running something like an Ignite with a Maker's Faire during one of the evenings, and try to bring variety & passion to the conference rather than have all MeeGo all the time.

The idea of Ignite (which Dawn knows well) is to have a drink-fuelled evening of crafts hacking + short strictly formatted presentations (20 slides, 15s per slide), where the focus is on breadth & depth of subjects. The wider the range of subjects in the presentations, the better. All the speakers are expected to practice, provide slides in advance, and be passionate about their subject.

For the "Maker's Faire" part of the evening, the goal is to have some kind of building competition - I've heard of bridge building competitions with popsicle sticks & glue guns, paper airplane competitions (with prizes for best looking, longest flight, greatest distance), sandcastle building competitions, kapla tower building, basically anything where you can get a large quantity of cheap materials (or something where you can rent materials cheap), and make teams to work on a project together, with small prizes for various technical & aesthetic categories.

These can be great fun, and they're a great opportunity to organise something as a group - Ignites are generally organised by anything from 2 to 6 people.

Cheers,
Dave.

[jaffa]

One thing I think would've been excellent to have last year at the Maemo Summit was a "Project Playground": a series of booths/tables where people could stand and demo their software for a while, discussing ideas with their users.

Some kind of provision for having breakout rooms/areas for projects to sign up for with plenty of power sockets and whiteboards would also be fab. For many small projects, these events are the only time the contributors get a chance to get together and discuss their projects.

The Maemo Summit was still very presentation-oriented last year. That's great, but we should try and have stuff going on outside those talks as well.

[qgil]

Posts related to the social event(s) are now in its own thread: http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=106

Please find or start specific threads if you want to discuss new MeeGo Conference topics not directly related to the organization team.

[jaffa]

A content/style related question then:

Originally Posted by qgil

There will be a program for sponsoring accommodation of remarkable MeeGo contributors.

I'd got the impression that this conference was a superset of the Moblin and Maemo Summits + new MeeGo content. The comment above (in context about Dublin being expensive) could indicate that remarkable Maemo contributors won't be sponsored. It could even mean that the content of the conference will have little relevance to Maemo users.

If so, the Maemo community might need to start considering organising its own get together.

[qgil]

The MeeGo conference is the conference of the MeeGo community. This is the first purpose it needs to fulfill. My personal opinion is that by that time any potential participant of a Maemo Summit will happily go to the MeeGo Conference. If you are concerned about the current Maemo community in relation to this event please let's start a new thread to discuss this.

[dneary]

Hi,

Originally Posted by qgil

Posts related to the social event(s) are now in its own thread: http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=106

Please find or start specific threads if you want to discuss new MeeGo Conference topics not directly related to the organization team.

What is related to the organization team? The content committee is separate (and handling the call for papers as I understand it) so the organization team has infrastructure, social events, facilities, design, printing & co-ordination (and all the detail work hich goes with these things). Or have I missed something?

Perhaps you want proposals for people to be on the organization team here?

Dave.

[qgil]

The simple aim is to have new topics discussed in their own threads, as opposed to having a single multipurpose thread mixing several topics in hundreds of posts. The MeeGo Conference is being organized in this forum, these threads are here not only to discuss but also to organize effective work. That's all.

[andreagrandi]

About the MeeGo Summit, I think there should be the following contents (most of these are not original ideas, but it's just to resume them all):

- conferences and announcement from Nokia/Intel
- lightning talks (5-10 minutes) made by community people
- interactive talks for developers (for example: a Qt expert shows how to play a network streaming using QtMobility and creating the application with Nokia SDK. All attending people must come with their own notebook and try to follow the instructions step-by-step.)
- normal talks (30-60 minutes)
- collaborative tasks (just like the Barcelona Meeting): small groups of people working together to improve existing applications
- interesting hacks with real devices (actually N900): for example show how to use N900 for unusual things ecc....

The real big question is: in which percentage the users want these contents?

Here comes my idea: people who are going to attend, should be able to decide (or at least giving a good idea) to the people who organize the Summit. Community should be able to vote the previous contents putting them in the preferred order of importance. This would result at the end of the poll with something like: 40% normal talks, 10% ligthning talks, 5% announces ecc.....