linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[Joey STANFORD <joey@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,


> I'd like to expand on this and bring up that I think Connect needs to move
> away from planning based on individual teams to cross-organizational
> tracks. I think this will alleviate of the scheduling pressure we had this time
> and create a more cohesive experience for everyone involved. So instead
> of having a bunch of random sessions in one day, we could have 3 tracks per
> day (ex: Android Upstreaming, Neon Optimizations, KVM) and we can have
> sessions from any groups that are relevant to that topic. This would mean
> that on certain days some groups may not have a session scheduled but
> I think that's OK.

Interesting idea.

Doing this has some advantages:

 * You don't need summit's "maximize attendee session time" algorithm
and could get by fine without it.

 * Topic based tracks pulls the entire organization together to work
on epic projects, which I suspect is the way we want to move to. It
points us towards organization goals vs individual and team goals.

 * Since you're working on topics, the ability to callout what those
sessions are should become much easier and can be done much earlier.
This would also eliminate the need for the Sunday night "let's huddle
and fix the schedule" activity. Even if we kept it, I suspect it would
go dramatically quicker.

 * We'd see a reduction in meeting rooms but an increase in
fishbowl/circular ballroom size rooms. Hangouts would be easier since
there would be less machines to care for each hour but we would have
need for additional microphones.


There is one big challenge I can see...

 * Big rooms, lots of people, lots of interruptions.  50 minutes might
not be enough so perhaps we'd need to double the session time. This
would mean two large sessions per track per day (since we only do this
in the morning) for a total of 6 big sessions a day.  I often have
felt that a 50 minute session time is too short for productive work
anyway.   Basically we could run each session like a 2 hour
mini-summit.  Each session would likely need to have several topics
but that's par for course a lot of the time now.


I can accommodate networking, scheduler, and AV for this without a
problem.  It /might/ be difficult finding a place with larger style
rooms though. It's challenging to reconfigure the plenary style room
to something that work for this format.

Joey