Foundation:
A point of clarification: On Wed 14 Dec 2011 04:42, Brian Cameron<[email protected]> writes:3. The GNOME community has been having trouble finding volunteers to help make events successful lately.You mention that we had a problem with this in the last Desktop Summit. Has this been a problem in other events as well?
Yes, as you might remember, we have had difficulties organizing the Boston Summit this past year, ending up relocating the event to Montreal rather last minute. Also, most of the volunteers who have made GNOME.Asia successful the past few years have indicated that they are stepping down, so the future of GNOME.Asia is unclear and plans are behind normal schedule. We need volunteer help in these areas badly. If we want to have the Boston Summit at MIT again, I believe we need to secure rooms in the next month or two. Any volunteers? We need help in these areas. Over the years, GNOME community events have grown in frequency, size and the expectations of hosting professional quality events. It is a challenge for a volunteer community to keep up with consistently year after year. Currently, events tend to be planned in isolation and there is too much reinventing of wheels. GUADEC planning, for example, tends to mostly be done by the team who won the bid, and their ability to put together a good event does vary quite a bit from year to year. Fortunately, the 2012 GUADEC Planning team does seem to be in good shape, so this is one upcoming event that I am not so concerned about. I am happy to hear several people report positively about the GNOME volunteer presence at the Desktop Summit, and I apologize for not mentioning the name of every volunteer who did a great job helping to make the event successful, such as Patricia Santana Cruz, Chris Kühl, Jon Nordby, Stormy Peters, Andreas Nilsson, and and William from Texas. I am sure there are many more who have not yet been mentioned. That said, I do think that the last Desktop Summit event suffered from a general lack of participation on the GNOME side of things. When we were unable to find a sponsor for GNOME social events, alternatives were not organized, for example. GNOME was unable to find resources to help with infrastructure issues, such as identify management or helping to setup a registration system (a longstanding problem we seem to have year after year). More seriously, a event like the Desktop Summit should inspire collaborative work and there did not seem to be enough effort in terms of planning concrete collaborative activities. If we are to hold Desktop Summits in the future, I think we need to focus more energy in these areas to make them successful. I am not trying to make volunteers who did a great job feel badly that they did not do enough. Instead, I am trying to highlight that the amount of work is great and growing. We need to consider how to better address this going forward. How we can ramp up the energy? If the workload is too great, should we scale back our event planning efforts, or find help in other ways (e.g. perhaps by hiring more event planning help)? Brian _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
