GUADEC For Everyone!
April 11, 2005 1:58 am General
The next round of the popular GNOME conference, GUADEC, is just around the corner. I’m pretty excited by the conference this year – it be the first year in a while where I’m not so much involved in the planning, and have no committments with the GNOME Foundation board of directors. I’m going over there with a real sense of being able to enjoy myself for the first time in ages, without large weighted decisions looming over me. Not only that, but we’ll be surrounded by good beer, sausages and large bosomed girls in tight leather pants. Okay, I suspect I’m thinking more of this – isn’t it a pity we couldn’t co-ordinate the dates?
I already had booked my flights, before I saw that the GNOME Foundation sorted out a 10-20% discount with Lufthansa and with other cheap airlines in Europe, it should prove to be much easier getting the Stuttgart this year. I also booked my accommodation on the same day, staying at the Hotel Unger for the few nights I’ll be in Stuttgart [26th May – 1st June]. The GUADEC guys also organized a discount for a number of hotels around the area, and there’s still hope we might be able to organize some cheaper accommodation like we had in Kristiansand last year.
Unfortunately we seem to have ended up with the same number of talks from previous years. Everyone wants to talk at GUADEC, and we’re trying desperately hard to accommodate everyone with a rather action packed schedule with some excellent speakers – both old and new. This year, we’re trying out a few new things –
- A separate Multimedia track – There’s always lots to talk about in the multimedia space, and we’ve given them their own track this year. Fluendo are also streaming the conference again this year, for those that can’t make the conference.
- Lightning talks – This was a successful addition to the Boston GNOME Summit last year that we were very keen to add to the schedule this year. We plan to have lots of people talking for a few minutes about their project. If you are interested, you should register your lightning talk here!
- Freeform sessions – We’ve introduced a new slot on Monday afternoon. We’re hoping that this will be where some hard planning, brainstorming, and problem solving happens for GNOME. We have 3 more freeform sessions to fill up and we’re quite keen for people to come up with suggestions and lead these sessions. The great Luis Villa has already signed up for a Marketing GNOME session – he doesn’t know it yet, since he’s currently touring the back and beyond in Australia! You’ll also notice there is an hour-long group session where all the groups report back on what each session has brainstormed.
There will be a certain amount of schedule activity as we start to finalize the current schedule, so if you have any specific comments you need to get them in now to guadec-planning [at] gnome [dot] org. As always, we’ll be using our wiki page, on live.gnome.org, for many announcements along with guadec-list.
Tell us you’re coming! – you can’t afford to miss it! Registration will be announced soon!
