talks on Fosdem

On Thursday, November 24, 2011, Dave Page wrote:

> 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.
>

The actually hard thing is to find a good *moderator* for this. Without a
good moderator, it is guaranteed to be a failure. With a good moderator,
it's at least less likely to fail, but by no means certain.

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.

And to make it work cross-project, said moderator should not be affiliated
with any of the same projects as the people on the panel. So a good start
is to find such a moderator.

Once found, it would really make a lot more sense on the general track
somewhere, than in the PostgreSQL devroom. One thing is we have very little
time, but more importantly it's something that would/should be of interest
to a much bigger part of the conference attendees than those likely to go
to the pgsql devroom.

> > 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 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?
>

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.

> 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".
>

Yeah, +1 again. But let's not forget this, but make sure it's includedin
next pgconf.eu

> 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?
>

The hours we have access to are controlled by the FOSDEM people. I don't
think we know the hours we have, but we've been told it's a total of 8
hours.

> > 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.
>
> 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 :-)

//Magnus

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/