hi bobert, we start the meeting now for now I can be here, but maybe I'll have to pay more attentiont o the meeting a bit later: ) hi thanks for organizing this meeting emily hi dneary_ Yes, thank you emily Let's start our first GUADEC committee meeting now Agenda: 1. self-introduction Emily Chen, from Beijing China, attend GUADEC 2007, 2008, and 2010. Start GNOME.Asia, mainly work on the GNOME Users Group and GNOME in Asia. Now help to organize a GUADEC committee team. Next one ? I'll do it Christophe Fergeau, from Paris, France, working at Red Hat, I helped with paper selection for last year GUADEC, and I've been organizing the fosdem gnome devroom for years Thanks teuf I'm Bob Murphy. I've been developing using GTK+, Clutter, etc. since 2006. I attended GUADEC 2007, presented (by proxy) in 2008, and also presented at the 2008 Ottawa Linux Symposium. I haven't helped organize a conference quite like this, but used to help organize the North Texas Irish Festival. BTW, I live near San Francisco, and am starting a Meetup group for GNOME developers if anyone's interested. thanks bobert yippi and dneary_ , who is next ? I'm Brian Cameron. I serve on the GNOME board of directors for the past 4 years and am currently the secretary. Worked for Oracle on the desktop about 10 years, mostly on GNOME. I am a GDM co-maintainer. me thank you yippi I'm Dave Neary, former board member, and actually got involved in GNOME through GUADEC in 2004 or 2005 was that when GUADEC was in Dublin? When I was a GIMP developer, and was organising the GIMP developers conference at GUADEC in Kristiansand 2003 was in dublin And have been involved to some extent in GUADEC every year since - and was the conference chair in Barcelona Any more ? If no more troduction, we will move to the next agenda Former board member (elected 3 times, one as treasurer, one as chairman) (sorry, thought you were asking me!) Thank you dneary_ Shall we move to the next agenda ? inquiring minds always want more i think so Thanks a lot for everyone to join the first GUADEC committee meeting. We will have more member join us in future. So the 2 agenda: everyone's interests and reponsibility in the committee https://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/CommitteeMembers emily: something that isn't clear to me yet is the committee exact role There are two GUADEC events currently being organized. One as part of the upcoming Desktop Summit, and also the 2012 GUADEC that we recently did a call-for-bids. Every core commitee member, please add your name and focus on this wiki page if you haven't do it yet is it to assist every year team with previous years experience or to do some things every year ? teuf: there will be local team based on the bid. We asisst them every year there are some activities that need to happen every year. I'd hope the committee would be able to help with these things, at least. we have not yet received bids for GUADEC 2012. It is starting to look like we will not be able to announce next year's GUADEC at the Desktop Summit. teuf: GUADEC committee is consider as a virtual team, help local organizors to do work, mainly through IRC and email. which may tend to push GUADEC ever farther back in the year yippi: the call for bid deadline is June 20th. 2 weeks to go yes, in past years, important steps have been skipped because there was no organizing group keeping the volunteers on schedule. so, i hope that a GUADEC committee would help to ensure that important things like this happen on a better considered schedule. yes, we do have 2 weeks. If it's not off-topic, why do you think nobody's responded to the call for bids? * teuf focuses on the phone call for a while I think that is on topic * teuf has heard about 1 potential bid In past years, there have been GNOME volunteers who have helped to push volunteers in various cities to propose a bid. however, I do not think there are many people in the community helping in this sort of way this year perhaps one issue is that as GUADEC grows, it becomes more work/effort to organize...and harder to organize in this sort of informal way yippi: is there some interested organization contact you already ? another issue is that we tend to like to have GUADEC in different places, and many places with the most active volunteers have hosted multiple GUADECS (e.g. Spain) yes, we have gotten a few questions from people considering to submit a bid...but it is looking like it will be slim pickings. Perhaps everyone things the world will end in 2012 thinks rather yippi, can we think about postponed the deadline for GUADEC ? call for bid deadline Let's back to our 2nd topic in the agenda Everyone's role and repsonsibility yippi, From experience, you will not receive very many spontaneous bids yes, we can push back the deadline You usually must search them out dneary, I think the point of setting up a committee was to make that "you" more community driven and transparent For instance, in the Hague, I pushed the Dutch guys to run one in Istanbul and Gran Canaria, and Stormy backed me up, and worked through the bid process with them (including reassuring them about the costs involved) yippi, s/you/one The Royal We perhaps "we"? I meant "you" as in the board Anyway, minutiae the problem with relying on the board is that it changes every year, and does not always have people so focused on GUADEC on it. yippi, I would concentrate on convincing one of the GNOME User Groups we now have (thanks to the GNOME 3 release parties) to get behind an event And have a centralised organisation here that co-ordinated & delegates organisation of certain things considering how much the board has been shook up in the past few years, and how few past board members are running, I anticipate this to get worse sooner The "reassuring about costs" makes a lot of sense. With NTIF (North Texas Irish Festival) if we hadn't had year-to-year continuity among organizers, it would have been scary as hell because 35,000 people attend. The program, sponsorship and co-ordination should all be central Would it be worth putting together a "how to organize a GUADEC" checklist document? dneary, that is a good point. We really should be reaching out more to our user groups Dealing with the venue, party venues and accommodation should all be local we put together a "how to organize a GUADEC" document every year Ah... thanks :-) yippi, I have also documented several times in the wiki milestones in the organisation process bobert: https://live.gnome.org/GuadecPlanningHowTo/CheckList the problem isn't so much not knowing what to do, but finding people to do the work. Keeping in good contact with the various user's groups is work where we need more help, as dneary highlights bobert, And also https://live.gnome.org/GuadecPlanningHowTo a similar problem is that everybody sort of assumes the board takes care of these things, which is only partially true perhaps because many past board members were also significant GUADEC organizers So - the question is, where would we like to have GUADEC next year? if we want to have it somewhere new, that limits the choices Italy has been most often suggested I have clear preferences: European hub cities, or smaller cities just outside them easily accessible by train from a big airport southeastern Europe or Moscow has been suggested for community building perhaps Portugal So that means Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Milan And London Is Moscow no hub? Since we've had Birmingham, and Berlin this year, and the Hague last year, Brussels or Milan/Rome seem like the best choices to me Someone want to host GUADEC in Candada, but it is out of European yippi, Moscow is barely in Europe yippi: moscow would be a visa nightmare I think It's very far away Moscow is as much in Europe as Istanbul if not moreso Exactly IMHO, Istanbul & Gran Canaria were mistakes in venue choice Because every American coming needed to fly through a European hub city to transfer there dneary. Fair enough. Moscow would also probably be a visa nightmare You could theoretically add Zurich as a hub, but that multiplies visa issues and we have had perhaps too many events in far-flung parts of Europe over the past few years before Amsterdam Although it's in Schengen now So, perhaps we should first push those users groups in the hub cities In "lessons we need to learn from this year", we need to start with a draft budget agreed by the board(s) early The first GUADEC was in France. Perhaps it might be a good time to encourage the French to do it again, considering the number of French leaders in our community yippi, The issue in France is that the French leaders are quite scattered, no real hub and not a huge gnome community I think, so makes things complicated there will likely be issues no matter where we try to have it. it's more a matter of managing the weaknesses, I'd think yippi, I agree Can we contact previous organizor who are not seletced but sent their proposal ? You definitely need someone to lead a bid, though emily, In 2010, we had one bid. In 2009, there was also Tampere (KDE went there in 2010) and A Coruna - they may bid again In 2008, only one bid IIRC And again in 2007. And 2006 we had 2 good bids, Birmingham and Lyon 2003, 2004 and 2005, only one bid. Lyon would be a good choice, and it's in France. I don't think I could put together a Lyon bid again. And I don't really have the time to volunteer to co-ordinate it. On second thoughts, I could probably get a bid together But the time volunteering for it is the tough one I am an independent consultant, and I'm already spending a lot of time being a peripheral organiser of GUADEC for the past several guadecs, there have been people paid to help with making the event happen. so, we probably again need to decide whether to do that again. At any rate, a bid that includes fees for the event planners is not unusual sounds reasonable though, in all situations where we have paid some money for an event planner, there has also been a reasonably strong community of volunteers on the ground. Having somebody paid to organize makes a lot of sense to me - again, we used to do that with NTIF. It's too much for a completely volunteer staff bobert, yes. Perhaps a more interesting question, though, is whether we should be paying more people. event planning is a lot of work. and GUADEC tends to be profitable anyway. It would likely be more profitable with better organization. Yes it is :) I'm not sure if we will continue having Desktop Summits every other year. But the fact that we have been does limit the number of GUADEC's we organize ourselves so we perhaps should make more of an effort to make the most of them. but, the most immediate problem at hand is that we don't seem to be getting bids for 2012. Just a reminder, we have 10 mins left for the IRC meeting. I can stay longer there is 2 weeks left to get bids, but I'm guessing we will have to extend that deadline if we don't get bids. agree Well, where do we want to go? Has there been any "unofficial interest" in bids? yippi, You think Lyon is a good choice? dneary, your suggestion of a hub city seems reasonable. dneary, yes I do. bobert: I've vaguely heard of one no idea if it will happen though :) How about something like Florence, Turin or Rome? if we need an action item, getting some people to volunteer to ping people in areas where we'd like to have an event would be helpful. Yes, a bid from Italy would be exciting. It's the biggest hub that has never had an event. However, most people seemed concerned that the GNOME community is so weak there. Istanbule GNOME community is also not strong The Italian parties were in Bologna, Vicenza and Prato Luca Firetti would be a good contact ferretti, I mean BTW, here is the GNOME 3 party in Europe. FYI . https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/LaunchParty#Europe Brussels would be possible I'm sure. Fred Peters, Damien Sandras, some of the FOSDEM organisers There's a critical mass near there Yes, Brussels would be nice Can I finish up with some lessons I think we need to learn from this year (albeit the conference co-ordination is still underway)? sure Budgets: Conferences need one, because you can't have the board or organisers second-guessing every expense. And the board needs to sign off on it, early in the process Like, October or November You don't have to spend any money until now, but we're going through a round of KDE eV board querying some of the costs in the budget as we speak Which will cost us valuable time at this point Website: We need access to some sysadmin time for about a week sometime around Christmas, and then designer time in January We ran late on this (as we always do) Overall, GUADEC costs tend to be in the same ballpark year after year, so this shouldn't be too hard. These two things are mistakes we always seem to make the biggest variable in cost seems to be whether or not the venue is free or not And venue: We need to have someone taking care of ensuring that we have good a/v, hands-free mics, etc Well, that's something that this group can transmit from one year to the next (the budget) Do we have a final Hague budget yet? For budget questions, we should ask gpoo or zana I haven't seen it on guadec-planning or foundation-list The venue hasn't been free for quite a few years. The variable is whether it's us paying for it, or some other body like the local region :) On another topic... I don't have a specific role for this. Is there something that needs done that I can do from San Francisco? yes, we need help contacting people to encourage them to bid for GUADEC 2012. focusing first on GNOME User's Groups in hub cities in Europe, such as Brussels, Milan, etc. can anyone help with this sort of action item? with only 2 weeks left for bids, that doesn't give us much time. Okay, and at first do you want to skip places like A Coruna? no, I think we should touch base with any location with a reasonable chance of putting together a bid. if we identify people who need help putting together a bid, we can try to put them in contact with someone who can help them. but first we need to identify who those people might be perhaps we should setup a wiki page where we list those people's who we have contacted? I can help contact people, but I can't really do anything until this coming weekend @yippi Great idea so we can coordiante and don't end up with multiple volunteers trying to ping the same person or, perhaps we could just make sure to cc: guadec-list on all emails? I like the idea of a web page because it's centralized and easy to see who's been contacted As opposed to having to remember or re-read emails <-- emily has quit (Ping timeout: 600 seconds) i'd say we should use live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2012 there is no page setup yet bobert, could you go ahead and create that? that seems a reasonable place to keep track of our bidding --> emily (~emily@221.223.43.252) has joined #guadec Sure, I'll create a main page, and then a subsidiary page for bids. dneary_, we've been talking a lot about GUADEC 2012 and the bids. While that is important to focus on with the June 20th deadline, is there anything we should be focusing on for the GUADEC at the Desktop Summit? sorry, I have internet disconnected for 15 mins bobert, cool thanks! emily, bobert agreed to an action item to create live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2012, and to start contacting user group and party contacts in European hub cities. emily, can you also help with that? i'd be happy to also. I would like to help but I think the first step was to create the http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2012 website and put together a list of people we should contact. Any more specific work I can help ? yippi and bobert ? bobert agreed to put up the website, but he probably needs help putting the list of people to contact together. https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/LaunchParty#Europe this link might be help OK I am happy to join emily, right, if you could help to put together the contact people from european hub cities on that webpage, then we can start contacting them. perhaps we could put together a draft email to use? OK, I will. And I think everyone can help to add more contact in this wiki yippi, Sorry, was AFK yes, draft email sounds cool Sure yippi, In terms of board oversight, we need to ensure the local team have autonomy to spend money reserving stuff now And in terms of risk management, we should make sure someone is dealing with the PC, keynotes and venue ensuring that everything speakers will need is available Also, the network supplier is something that the board should be asking about at this point. It's a big cost, and I have no idea how far along it is dneary_, I believe the board has already approved everything relating to the Desktop Summit that has crossed our agenda. Other than that, the venues for parties seems to be coming along, we have accommodation for people, and the only other ? for me is how much sponsorship revenues we'll have coming in Hmm. I'm logged into live.gnome.org, but I'm not allowed to create a page. yippi, Ping Andreas and ask him if he's happy with the DS budget as it stands, just to check? please? bobert. that is odd. i can't create subpages under live.gnome.org/GUADEC either yippi, I'm just pointing out the stuff that I think could be risky In general, I'd be asking Kat to give you monthly updates by email with a checklist of stuff sure, I can ping andreas. But we tend to ping him at every meeting about Desktop Summit stuff. The checklist would be sponsorship, venue, registration, speaker relations, party venues And budget OK And he's happy with things? Ah. Just created the page. he seems to be. he hasn't raised any serious issues to the board's attention. At least, a placeholder. nor has Kat It just surprised me to see an email from Cornelius Schumacher this morning questioning the budget - I want to make sure that the GNOME board's happy with it ok i don't think I saw that email from Cornelius It was on the desktop summit team list german and andreas are on there but, I will make sure to raise these concerns at the next board meeting. In light of this GUADEC planning meeting, perhaps this will prompt some discussion. And Kat and I Among others We have IRC meeting for about 1.5 hours Sorry I was disconnected for 20 mins. New AI for this meeting: Should we continue, or have another meeting soon? yippi and dneary_: do we have more to discuss ? The next meeting will be in June 20 Thanks yippi! Do we want bi-weekly meeting or weekly meeting in the begining then swith back to bi-weekly when things goes smoothly ? sounds good i think a bi-weekly meeting makes sense until we get close to the Desktop Summit. I would want meetings to have more of an agenda I'd suggest we try bi-weekly right now, and if we find next time we need to switch to weekly, we can bi-weekly or weekly is a lot dneary_: you can add more agenda for next meeting I'd think once we get past the Desktop Summit, we should have a bid for 2012 figured out, and things will probably be less busy until early 2012. emily, The agenda comes from what people want to talk about i would like to see more discussion on the guadec-list mailing list. So the question is: why do we need to meet again so quickly? New AI: (bobert, Emily, Brian) action item to create live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2012, and to start contacting user group and party contacts in European hub cities. i'd like to see us putting together an agenda there. Providing updates about who we are contacting I will create a upcoming meeting wiki page so everyone can add new agenda there I find that whenever a new committee forms, it is good to have regular meetings to get people discussing AI : Emily - create a upcoming meeting wiki page so everyone can add new agenda there We haven't set the role yet for everyone with the Desktop Summit approaching, there should be things to discuss let alone managing the 2012 Call for Bids. one issue is that 2 weeks from today is the Call for Bids deadline. if we meet then, what will we discuss...whether to decide to extend the deadline or not? Will this meeting discuss Desktop Summit or only focus on the GUADEC 2012 ? This is a meeting of the GUADEC planning committee. I'd think we should probably focus a bit on both yes, let's meet on June 20 to discuss more based on the biding result okay, so we'll plan to figure out whether to extend the deadline or not when we meet on the 20th then. ok this means we will not have any more meetings before then, so any coordination we need to do to make sure we contact any potential bid submitters has to be done via email and the wiki between now and then, right? I've added the wiki page for organizing our contacts with candidate locations: http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2012/Bids cool Let's add more names in this list Any other NEW AIs ? Sorry I miss 20 mins OK. cool Are we done today ? I think so. I'll add the cities mentioned in this discussion to the bids web page, and then people can add new ones or volunteer to contact them. Thanks for updating the page, yippi And emily, thank you very much for organizing this today I added a few people that Dave recommended. Namely Fred Peters and Damien Sandras for Brussels, Luca Ferretti for Italy and Dave Neary for Lyon My pleasure, bobert In addition we should add people who sponsored parties near European hubs. BTW, I have a new AI , to invite more people to join our committee Okay, I'll add the folks who sponsored parties near the hubs, too I think Milan, Brussels, and anywhere in Italy is a good place to start...but we should hopefully expand to all hub cities. We probably should send them a fairly standard letter telling them that we would love them to consider helping to host GUADEC near their region. --- Notify: halfline is online (irc.eagle.y.se). perhaps someone could draft such an email and send it to guadec-list for review? I am not Native English speaker, can someone else help on this ? yippi: can you send me the meeting log ? I disconnected for 20 mins I can post a draft message if we don't need to have it right away. Great, thanks bob bobert, I don't think we need to make this too formal. Perhaps when you start contacting them, you can just send a copy of the letter you are using to guadec-list then if others have suggestions on how to improve it, we can improve it as we go or if someone else starts contacting people before bobert, they can share the email they are using. Good thoughts, yippi. I wasn't thinking formal, but I'll be busy with meetings this week. i understand. i just think if we standardize on some good text, then it will be easier for people who don't speak English as their first language to help. I think a draft email first, then everyone can use this template to contact potencial organozors actually, emily, I think you might be a good person to put together such an email. You actually have done a lot of work lately contacting users groups lately i'd be happy to fix the grammar, etc, if you put together what you think the letter should say we've worked like this before sounds like an English course for me :-) :) haha Emily, your English is actually very good OK, I will draft it and yippi will help to review, then send to guadec-list ? If I didn't already know you were in Beijing, I would have thought you were in Palo Alto thanks emily BTW, do we need a committee member only mail list ? Or just use gudec-list mail list Either way is fine with me. I can't think of anything we're discussing that can't be discussed on the public list - can anybody else think of anything? Otherwise, it sounds like adding another mail list is just more work for somebody. isn't guadec-planning a private/closed list? might be better to go with that one? * teuf doesn't know i am not in the guadec-planning list We can use guadec-list first Neither am I, afaik can someone send me the IRC log ? @emily: I just emailed it to you thank you very much bob teuf, guadec-planning is the private list I'd expect us to use that https://live.gnome.org/GUADEC-2011-0606 this is the meeting minutes for today emily, Thanks! I am still working on it, need to read the log I miss I will send it out tomorrow for everyone to review Nice! Thank you, emily The meeting is done See you in June 20th