Initial schedule ready

May 9, 2006 10:54 pm Dave Neary gnome, guadec
GUADEC schedule - post-it style

So, the first draft of the GUADEC schedule is ready – just waiting for publishing, and it should be online over the next couple of days.

I’m a low-tech kind of guy, and the process for doing the schedule was sufficiently interesting I thought I’d blog about it.

First, I taped together some A4 sheets, and drew out the schedule shape we’d agreed on – 3 parallel sessions, X hours for lunch, Y keynotes per day, etc.

Then I wrote the names of the accepted talks on sticky notes, color-coding them according to their track & stream.

And the sticky notes attacked the paper. A first quick draft was easily shuffled until I had something I was more or less happy with. And a few photos and a rough stitch later, here’s the end result.

4 Responses

  1. Martin Sevior Says:
    May 10th, 2006 at 10:27 am

    Jeeze Dave, use CDS Agenda! You’re give GNOME geeks a bad name 🙂

    http://cdsware.cern.ch/agenda/

    Cheers!

    Martin

  2. Martin Sevior Says:
    May 10th, 2006 at 10:32 am

    Hmm it appears agenda has been depreciated in favour of “indico”.

    http://cdsware.cern.ch/indico/overview.html

    It’s great to see CERN supporting the development of GPL’d software 🙂

  3. Dave Neary Says:
    May 10th, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    Martin:
    1. I didn’t know about it
    2. I like the smell of paper
    3. Actually shuffling things around is so much easier and moire pleasing without a mouse (this is the same reason I sometimes play solitaire with a deck of cards, but never on the computer)

    I did look for a scheduling programme last year – I thought that SchoolBell might be able to help, but that project seems to have stalled a bit.

  4. Martin Sevior Says:
    May 10th, 2006 at 11:37 pm

    Hi Dave,
    actually I really like your solution. I just thought I’d make you aware of a great piece of well supported free software that works really well.

    I used it last year to prepare a little conference of about 40 presentations. It has lots of nice features. Number one is that you can run the entire thing froma single laptop. Presenters upload their presenetation tot he webpage before hand, and just click on it to display it froma web browser.

    The audience (as well as optionally the rest of the world)
    as direct access to the webpage so the talks are instantly available to anyone interested.

    It does scheduling too.

    It’s a really nice system.

    Cheers

    Martin