Safe as Milk

Initial schedule ready

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.

GUADEC authors notified

Last night I sent out 33 acceptance mails to people who had presentations accepted for the core days of GUADEC. We now need to arrange those talks in a schedule which will annoy as few people as possible – it’ll probably be done in July 😉

I would like to thank everyone who helped with the selection of papers – it was relatively pain free this year. Those people are Ross Burton, Rodrigo Moya, Edd Dumbill and the ever-present Quim Gil. All these people are rock stars, and should be hugged in Barcelona.

This year we have made GUADEC’s core days lean and mean – there will be 6 keynote sessions, the conference opening and closing, the GNOME Foundation AGM, a lightning talks session, and 33 presentations, split along the lines of theme and target audience.

The “target audience” idea seemed to catch some people off guard, so I’d like to explain it a little, since most of the accepted papers will not be where they were proposed.

User: Showcasing an application, or API, that is shipped with the GNOME desktop, or a closely remlated application. The APIs are part of our products as well, and third party developers are important users of the platform product.

Developer: Talks aimed at GNOME developers – people working on improving core GNOME applications or APIs. Most of the talks were submitted here.

Client: Poeple who will pay for GNOME, or sell GNOME, in one way or another. Third party developers fit in here too, GNOME deployment stories, writing vertical applications, GNOME marketing; that kind of thing.

We got the fewest applications for the client day, so many of the talks there will only be tenuously associated with the theme. But since there was so much confusion about the categories, I thoughth it would be useful to (re)explain them.

Disruptive technologies

Calum says:

Part of the reason StarOffice (and by association, OpenOffice.org) is “just as complicated and feature overridden as the real thing”, of course, is that whenever Sun tries to take out feature X, customer Y complains and stops buying it. Being disruptive is so much easier when you’re starting from scratch with nothing to lose 🙂

I have two reactions to this:

1. What, you mean like Mozilla? Firefox started from the Mozilla suite, lots of customers, and 3 to 5 percent market share. OOo is probably around the 3% market share. What customers?

2. I don’t live in the US, and I’ve never heard Howard Stern’s radio show. But I did see “Private Parts”, which I thought was a very funny film.

   Stern was a disruptive technology – one of the first “shock jocks” to hit the mainstream market at a big network. There’s this one scene in the movie where the Washington station where he’s working is just about to cut him, because all their old, traditional sponsors are deserting them in droves. But Stern knows that the listenership figures are flying up, and the sponsors will follow the listeners.

   Just as the station is reaching its breaking point, and the director is saying once again “That’s it, you’re out”, newer, bigger, better sponsors start rolling in, and the station hits a new high, with Stern as their headline act.

   All disruptive technology has a break with the past, where old assumptions get turned on their head, and the people who can’t keep up hop off the train or get left on the platform. But the visionaries, the ones who know that their ideas, if brought to their logical conclusion, will change the world (or at least US talk-show radio) persist, and take those short term hits because they know that just over the next summit, we descent into the lush green valleys of the promised land.

   OpenOffice.org and GNOME both need to be a bit more like Stern.

Lyon for GUADEC

So – the Lyon candidature was submitted earlier today, and thanks to some magnificent work over the Easter weekend from Vincent Untz and Oscar Figuieredo (especially Oscar), it was looking rather spiffy.

The final copy is online at http://dneary.free.fr/lyon-guadec.pdf (.odt for the OOo source). The introduction summarises why I think Lyon is a good candidate:

Lyon is a great city for this conference for a number of reasons. First, the city itself is young, vibrant, beautiful, and well placed in Europe. Second, the GNOME and free software communities are particularly active in the region. Thirdly, CPE Lyon, the host university, knows the free software community, and has fantastic facilities. It is the ideal location for this kind of event.

Did I mention the food? Lyon is a great place to eat – just ask the people who came here in March for the Libre Graphics Meeting.

It goes without saying that as supporters of this candidature, myself and Vincent Untz will not be taking any part in the decision which town will host.

GUADEC candidates

I was working on Lyon’s candidature as GUADEC host last night, and noticed that the closing date for proposals was next Wednesday, the 19th of April.

I had forgotten it was that close, and I wonder if others had let it slip their minds too.

It’ll be interesting to see if the earlier announced candidacies from Vienna, Vilnius and London materialise – but the Lyon candidature will be in decent shape.

I’m looking forward to the mud-wrestling competition we are going to have in Barcelona to separate the shortlisted candidates – Thomas Wood, are you ready to rumble?

770 adapter: update

Thanks to all who commented on how to get an adaptor for my 770 – several of you mentioned that the chargers are the sam as for the Nokia N70, N90 and others. So I got one of those, but can’t help but feel that I was a bit fleeced – I paid €15 for it. And that was after shopping around in a big department and 2 specialist mobile phone stores.

Thank you, O Lazyweb, thou art wise and knoweth all things.

770 power adapter

I recently lost my adapter/recharger for my Nokia 770 – anyone know where/how I can get a replacement?

Desktop Linux Summit

The GNOME Foundation has a stand at the “Desktop Linux Summit” in San Diego this year – the event is on the 24th and 25th of April.

I’m looking for a couple of volunteers who would like to go and man the stand during the two days, we can cover some printing costs for the stand and send on some merchandising. We can probably also cover (reasonable) travel costs, if you need them. Jeff Waugh, Nat Friedman and other GNOME lovers will be there as speakers, and it’ll be great fun.

Who’s up for it?

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Join the GNOME marketing team! We need all the help we can get!

Mail to warm the cockles

I got a mail today from a Libre Graphics Meeting attendee (hope he doesn’t mind me republishing part of it) and it’s put me in a good mood for the day, I think.

The Meeting was a resounding success especially for every second that
one projects developer spoke to another.

Thanks to things that happened and inspired at the conference massive
progress is being made.

For example,Inkscape is now depending on Little CMS for build as Jon
implements named colors. We’re also now saving out XCF files of Inkscape
SVG files that include gimp layers and using gimp palettes across both
applications thanks to a little symlinking on build. Its a digital
artists dream come true.

LGM has also inspired new contributors to participate and previous ones
to direct their efforts to fulfil common needs. All because we got
multiple cooperative projects in the one room.

Pet peeve

Why do Americans utilize the word “utilize”, rather than the less pretentious and simpler “use”?