Re: talks on Fosdem

Hello,

On 24.11.2011 15:37, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> In my experience, in all the postgres conferences I've been to that there
> have been panel discussions in, not a single one of them can be said to be
> anythig but a failure. (FWIW, i didn't go to any of the panels (if there
> was more htan one) at pgopen). With a good moderator it's been less bad,
> but that's far from good.

I fear there is a huge culture difference. I heard that especially in the US
this often ends up in senseless muckraking.

I saw two very good SQL vs. NoSQL panel discussion this year.
Ok - I have to say the second was SQL vs. CouchDB.
The second was better then the first.

During the first we figured out that there are tons of users who didn't
understand the sense of NoSQL. Where even the NoSQL representatives
said "hell that is stuff you really better solve with SQL".

So the second concentrated on use cases. When it makes sense to use
CouchDB when it makes sense to use SQL. And also the second
showed that NoSQL and SQL aren't enemies.
>
>>> Originally, we wanted to use Fosdem also to do a members meeting.
>> Unfortunately the availability of rooms at FOSDEM is so tight that we
>> can't easily do this. It's something that we should consider for the
>> next PGEU conference though - we can easily put aside a room for an
>> hour or two there.
>>
> Yeah, +1 on doing that for next pgconf.eu. If we want to do it during
> FOSDEM, we're better off getting ourselves a room at our hotel (or another
> hotel or conference place nearby) on the sunday rather than using up our
> precious devroom time for it.

I like the idea too.
Doing our internal stuff on pg eu conf makes much more sense then doing it
on Fosdem.

But I see some organisational problems:

1. Usually we should do a meeting before the next election or?
2. When we do a members meeting on PG EU conf then we should make sure
that members are able to enter the meeting cost free.

> Well, it's JPA, not Magnus and JPA that usually presents it. And I also
> remember it not being done last year (it was sent on email only) - I don't
> recall the reason though.

JPA planned to do it on Fosdem. I also remember that he wanted to represent
the financial statement for two year.

As far as I remember it was skipped for two reasons.
1. JPA couldn't make it to Fosdem
2. Because we just got so less slots

I never got an email with the statement. Means - either he just send it
to the
board not to all members - or it end up in my spam filter.

Doesn't matter anyway any more.
It would be nice when you could look that we get this done in 2012 some how.

>
>>> When we just have a few hours again - shouldn't we think about sticking
>>> together and talk about special topics together? Ad hoc speaking instead
>>> of huge prepared slides. Having a group of speakers concentrating on the
>>> real questions the people have instead of just single speakers who talk
>>> about
>>> a special topic and not enough time for questions.
>> FOSDEM is our primary chance each year to reach out to non-PG people -
>> there are so many of them at the event that I think we have no choice
>> but to focus on new users there, and save the "internal" stuff for
>> other events where there are a) more PG people in attendance and b)
>> fewer constraints on the spaces available to us.
>>
>> Yeah, I agree with that. We can, and will, of course spend the
> outside-conference-hours doing just that as well - talk about postgresql
> and pgeu :-)

Here you totally misunderstood me.

Fosdem is for Developers. Like Dave pointed out - for making PG interesting
to new users - but also for raising knowledge of existing users.

What I wanted to say is:
It might make sense that you think about the topics that should be placed.
And then look for speakers.

If there are more speakers for a single topic then just ask them if they
want to do
it together.

Or - when you get suggestions from more speakers to the same topic then just
ask them if they could do it together.

So you don't have to reject so much speakers.

Also, my experience is that talks made by more then a single person usually
have more dynamic. You won't fall asleep so easily. And you might get more
point of views in a single slot.

Susanne

--
Susanne Ebrecht - 2ndQuadrant
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
www.2ndQuadrant.com