Open Stack

On 11/27/2017 11:58 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> We are in the final step in the process of signing the contract with the
> PTG venue. We should be able to announce the location this week !
> 
> So it's time to start preparing. We'll have 5 days, like in Denver. One
> thing we'd like to change for this round is to give a bit more
> flexibility in the topics being discussed, especially in the first two days.
> 
> In Denver, we selected a number of general "themes" and gave them all a
> room for 2 days on Monday-Tuesday. Then all the "teams" that wanted a
> project team meeting could get a room for 2 or 3 days on
> Wednesday-Friday. That resulted in a bit of flux during the first two
> days, with a lot of empty rooms as most of the themes did not really
> need 2 days, and a lot of conflicts were present.
> 
> For Dublin, the idea would be to still predetermine topics (themes and
> teams) and assign them rooms in advance. But we would be able to assign
> smaller amounts of time (per half-day) based on the expressed needs.
> Beyond those pre-assigned themes/teams we'd add flexibility for other
> groups to book the remaining available rooms in 90-min slots on-demand.
> A bit like how we did reservable rooms in the past, but more integrated
> with the rest of the event. It would all be driven by the PTGbot, which
> would show which topic is being discussed in which room, in addition to
> the current discussion subject within each topic.
> 
> We have two options in how we do the split for predetermined topics. We
> used to split the week between Mon-Tue (themes) and Wed-Fri (teams). The
> general idea there was to allow some people only interested in a team
> meeting to only attend the second part of the week. However most people
> attend all 5 days, and during event feedback some people suggested that
> "themes" should be in the mornings and "teams" in the afternoons (and
> all Friday).

I'm not sure about "most people", I guess you're more informed than me :) I used 
to be on board with "let us make more people attend by stretching the teams 
part" previously. But after seeing actual budget problems, I started to think 
that allowing people to travel only for 3 days is a feature.

Side note: I expect a substantial share of people, especially from Europe, to 
arrive on Monday morning and leave on Friday evening.

> 
> What would be your preference ? The Mon-Tue/Wed-Fri split means less
> room changes, which make it easier on the events team. So all else being
> equal we'd rather keep it the way it is, but I'm open to changing it if
> attendees think it's a good idea.

I'm kind of +0 on experimenting with it, taking into account what I mentioned above.

> 
> If you have any other suggestion (that we could implement in the 3
> months we have between now and the event) please let me know :)
>