hi folks, it was mentioned in the meeting that the time of the conference would be discussed later, and to focus on the dates, so i therefore did not say anything further. however a follow-up comment by people with more experience (whom i did not feel comfortable contradicting, having been asked not to discuss the matter further in the meeting) led to a potential assumption that i had been asking about *website* timezones. now that the meeting is over i feel it is ok to clarify.
i was not asking about the accuracy of *website* timezones, i was raising a different matter. when people attend a physical conference, if they are from a different continent they will usually come over a few days beforehand in order to adjust to that timezone. however for an online conference it is extremely unlikely that people will adjust to waking up in darkness *in their own timezone*, a few days beforehand in order to attend an online conference in real time :) my point is that *when* the discussion takes place as to what range of times the conference is to take place, given the world-wide distributed nature of debian it would be really nice for it to be possible for people from all continents to be able to attend in real-time as opposed to looking at the schedule, realising that there's not a single talk they could be awake for, and, given that one of the nicest things about conferences is interacting with other people to discuss a talk and ask questions, not attending at all. from experience in having done online international conference calls for 15 years, there is *one* range of times that can (just about) be attended by people in GMT-8, GMT+0-2, and GMT+8-10 (US, UK/EU, AU), which is around 21:00 UTC to 23:00 depending on which half of the year (summer, winter). winter (northern hemisphere winter that is) is a lot easier due to AU going 2 hours (they go forward, we go back). i really liked the idea of the international language conferences. whilst this might sound natural/obvious, it occurred to me that perhaps if there is a strong focus on say spanish-speaking submissions that the times for those could be analysed to suit the geographic timezone locations of attendees. l.
