Re: talks on Fosdem

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 7:22 AM, Susanne Ebrecht
<susanne(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> of course I saw all the cfp announcement.
>
> Honestly, I would like to see a panel discussion between Dave / Magnus (a
> person
> from PG Core) and either Monty or a NoSQL representative.

I would have no objection to that - though if it were Monty we'd have
to be *very* careful that it didn't just become a pissing match
between PG and MySQL. That's easier with NoSQL, because we could
discuss the merits of products with very different focusses, rather
than the merits of two products that are essentially competing.

> 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.

> I would like to see the financial statement on upcoming Fosdem.
>
> How much money did we collect? How much did we spend?
> For what did we spend money? Who is our biggest sponsor?
> How much money / donations do we really need in Europe?

We present the financial report every year at FOSDEM. Magnus and JPA
do it in the opening session in our devroom. That said, I don't
remember seeing it this year - did it get dropped for some reason?

> Also I would like that we think about PG EU.
> A kind of 5-years revenue. With un-nice questions like:
> Was it a success? Was it a good idea? Did we reach what we wanted?
> Are the original thoughts still covered? Do we still need PG EU?
> What are the future plans?

Well those are things to discuss on this list, or at a conference with
a larger PG audience (like PGConf). At FOSDEM, there's really just a
small group of the PGEU "regulars".

> Looking back to Fosdem 2011:
> We got a dev room on Saturday.
>
> In all past years - Fosdem always started on Saturday around noon.
> I once got told that the reason for it is - that the Belgian Saturday
> mornings
> are usual work and school days. Means - universities have usual services
> during
> the morning.

Yes.

> Also 2011 - Fosdem started around noon.
> That means we only could place very few talks.
>
> Spending an hour for the financial statement was skipped.
>
> How is it 2012?
> Is a members meeting planned?
>
> 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.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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