X Developers' Summit -- 10th-12th September, Cambridge, UK

[Daniel Stone]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 03:08:04PM +0200, Matthias Hopf wrote:
> Unfortunately, this clashes with SUSE's Labs conference, so no SUSE
> developer will be able to join :-(

Hi,
Sorry to hear this.

> I find it a bit disturbing, that things like a developer conference are
> discussed and planned behind closed curtains. Though I very much
> appreciate that you are working on that, we should think about the form
> how planning is done.

By 'closed curtains', I assume you mean that a small cabal had planned
it.  It was really only planned by myself, with approval from the board.
As I said, I'd hoped to get it out much earlier, but venue issues (plus
any number of real life issues) prevented that.

> Yes, there has been a short notice on irc (I would never call that an
> announcement, though) that something like that is planned. But I think
> it is much better for the community if something like that is announced
> early (even if the date isn't fixed, or the event might fail to deliver)
> - and on the mailing list.

This is true: the original plan was to have everything out in March, not
July.

> irc is not searchable (except for your own logs), if you're not logged
> in you miss things, and even if you *are* logged in, you easily miss
> important information, due to the non-threaded nature and the big amount
> of noise there.

Obviously planning on IRC is bad, but that's not where the conference
planning was done.

> I'm not complaining here (haven't done any X.org conference planning
> except for the small Birds of a Feather on last year's SigGraph lately),
> but I think an open source project should plan its major conferences in
> the open as well. Especially if sponsoring is involved.

Fair enough.  FWIW, sponsors have not been involved in the planning:
we're in touch with several candidates with regards to sponsoring social
events and things like that, but they haven't been involved in the early
(such as it is) planning stage, and there's nothing underhand going on.

Cheers,
Daniel
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