Re: pre-Guix Days

[Pjotr Prins]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 09:30:21PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:
> 
> > The proposed timeline is:
> >
> >   Start at 9:00, welcome everyone, explain the schedule.
> >   9:15: first talk. 30 minutes, and 15 minutes for questions
> >   10:05: second talk, same format
> >   10:55: third talk, 15 minutes, 10 minutes for questions
> >   10:25: fourth talk, same format
> >   10:55: break, free talk on irc
> >   11:30: presentation of the rest of the activities.
> >   11:40: first unconference session (encourage people to chair a session
> >   with their favorite subject, and letting them work/discuss)
> >   13:00: summary of previous session and second session
> >   14:30: summary of previous session, break and free talk
> >   16:00: summary of previous session and third session
> >   17:30: summary of previous session and fourth session
> >   19:00: summary of previous session, the chair gives final thoughts on
> >   the day. Free discussion on IRC.
> 
> Yay, thanks *a lot* for this initiative!
> 
> I think it’s a great opportunity (esp. the talks) to reach out to people
> who probably wouldn’t come physically to the Guix Days because they
> don’t consider themselves “part of the group”, so we should advertise it
> widely (and be ready to scale accordingly :-)).

It is a great idea with a virtual conference to expand the attendee
group. There are many people out there toying with Guix, or wanting to
toy (recently I have been chatting with a finance guy in Japan who
loves Scheme and coming from Nix). This implies we should cater for
this group too, i.e., make it accessible. Because we can have parallel
sessions we should have one thread for beginner enthusiasts. Wdyt?

> > If you are still reading, there is an interesting feedback on LWN.
> > EmacsConf provides also information about tools (recording, etc.)
> >
> >   <https://lwn.net/Articles/830436/>
> >   <https://emacsconf.org/2019/tips/>
> 
> The LWN article is a great source.  Note that they had a lot of
> resources (hardware) to run BBB.  From what they write, I’m not sure we
> could rely on a single shared BBB instance like that of Aquilenet.

What are the suggestions for alternatives? Jitsy+IRC can probably handle
talks with many people, but what do we use for a more unconference
style? Part of the unconference is a management aspect where people
and work gets 'divided'. This is very hard to do online with a lot of
people unless it is 'preset'. Which is not really the unconference
way.

In fact, if we take it to a real conference with 100+ attendees we may
be better off with a more classic presentation model. Have a coding
hackathon the day after. Or, similar to suggested above, two mornings
of talks and two evenings of coding. But I fear a true unconference
will be very hard to organize.

I am asking because we should also decide about the FOSDEM Guix days
and virtual beers. FOSDEM will be online and will attract thousands!!

We'll have a crowd.

Separate question: should we try and submit a proper GNU Guile/Guix
devroom again? The alternative minimalism devroom strategy works, so
far, but it kinda became the basket for all talks that can't go
elsewhere. I mean it is variable though we got some outstanding
presentations through that room 

https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/track/minimalistic_experimental_and_emerging_languages/

Pj.