linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[Amit Kucheria <amit.kucheria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 3:23 AM, Jesse Barker <jesse.barker@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 12:27 PM, Joey STANFORD <joey@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Isn't this basically how Linux Plumbers is run (with half-day
> microconferences), and don't we have some experts from the LPC
> planning committee available to us to find out how they do it
> (assuming this is actually what we want to do)?

It is similar to Plumbers. And we do have experts - Paul McKenney is
chair for this year's event and Grant is involved in the organising
committee as well.

And Vincent and I will let you all know our experiences running the
scheduler mini-conference in August.