asterisk users - Jun 2008 - [asterisk-dev] Astricon question: four or five tracks?

At 2:46 AM +0000 2008/6/13, Nicolas Chapleau wrote:
>
>As the Asterisk user base expands and possibly Astricon with it, the 
>attendees become more diversified and could benefit from additional 
>tracks. I agree with Matt on trying as much as possible to identify 
>and lay out the tracks so that one doesn't impede another too much. 
>You might even have repeat talks on known popular topics, or again 
>as Matt points out, nightly video replays.
>
>    This being said, I like the 5 track option. Heck, add the Dallas 
>Cowboy Cheerleaders as a sixth track and I'll attend that one too!
>
>NicChap
So far, it seems that the general consensus (public and private 
replies) is that we should add the fifth track.  Thanks to those that 
have responded, publicly and privately.

I agree that we will have to work hard to schedule the talks so that 
sessions that would be interesting to a particular set of people will 
not overlap, but Asterisk components appeal to different people in 
different arrangements so this may not be possible in all cases.

I did receive one objection so far to the fifth track because of the 
fear of missing a good talk in the other four tracks.  However, I'm 
not sure how we overcome that problem if we don't add the track, as 
we would have to dump 11 talks if we didn't have that additional room 
for speakers, meaning that the results would be identical: some good 
talks would not be able to be seen.

The suggestion by you and others of creating videos of the talks is a 
good one, and we had already started the discovery process of 
determining cost for doing just that.  If we determine that it is 
within the budget, our goal would be to make the videos available to 
conference attendees as soon as possible after the talks are over to 
allow participants to see the talks that they had missed due to 
scheduling.  This decision and arrangement is still pending, but 
we're hoping that we can do this to address the concerns of 
overlapping tracks.  More on this hopefully soon.  I would suspect 
that most (but possibly not all) of the videos would be available 
only to attendees if such a videography can be arranged.

Nicolas: we'll leave your concept of a sixth track involving sequins 
and pom-poms as a hypothetical concept, though feel free to suggest 
it for next year.  :-)

JT

-- 
--
John Todd              jtodd at digium.com
Asterisk Open Source Community Director

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 06:34:26PM -0700, John Todd
wrote:
> I did receive one objection so far to the fifth track because of the 
> fear of missing a good talk in the other four tracks.  However, I'm 
> not sure how we overcome that problem if we don't add the track, as 
> we would have to dump 11 talks if we didn't have that additional room 
> for speakers, meaning that the results would be identical: some good 
> talks would not be able to be seen.
In fact, no, John, it's worse: if you schedule the 5th track, *some*
percentage of the attendees may find a conflict, and have to miss a
presentation.

If you *don't* schedule the 5th track, *100%* of the attendees will not
see any of those 11 speakers.
> The suggestion by you and others of creating videos of the talks is a 
> good one, and we had already started the discovery process of 
> determining cost for doing just that.  If we determine that it is 
> within the budget, our goal would be to make the videos available to 
> conference attendees as soon as possible after the talks are over to 
> allow participants to see the talks that they had missed due to 
> scheduling.  This decision and arrangement is still pending, but 
> we're hoping that we can do this to address the concerns of 
> overlapping tracks.  More on this hopefully soon.  I would suspect 
> that most (but possibly not all) of the videos would be available 
> only to attendees if such a videography can be arranged.
If your agreements with the speakers permit, you should probably not
restrict sales to registered attendees; as I noted before, the reports
I hear from conference arrangers seems to suggest that the videos won't
cannibalize the show; hell, NANOG streams them, *and* gives the videos
away for free...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at
baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com                    
'87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274

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