[Members] Re: DRAFT airlie

[Eric Anholt]

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 16:09 -0400, Leon Shiman wrote:
> on Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:00:21 +0200 Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> >
> >On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 03:08:15AM +0200, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> >> 
> >> Meetings and events, and getting people together is a very important 
> >> topic. 
> >> 
> >> I would like to know where this line of "reasonable" and "made 
> >> sense" is. As already explained, Linuxday.at 2005 turned out to be a 
> >> case where this line was not shared by all board members.
> 
> I wished not to respond to this question because my view of the Board 
> discussion differs from the one posted, and I think there are much more 
> important issues on the table. Had I been aware of Linuxday.at, I would have 
> called for support and tried to attend. I had participated in public forums 
> the year preceding in Berlin and in Dresden.
> 
> I have tried to make clear my belief that industry events which offer free 
> booth space among open source colleagues, under the financial umbrella of 
> our corporate sponsors, attended by university, government, private sector, 
> and developer is valuable. The cost is minimal, and the booth staff is free. 
> I have spoken with thousands (by now) who are intensely curious about the 
> organization, its products, and its policies. Many active developers are 
> present who are interested to exchange information about their respective 
> organizations.

I did the LWE trade show a year or so ago for Xorg.   It was somewhat
cheap as far as travel goes -- about $600 without hotel costs (had to
share a room).  We had a spiffy booth, and I talked with people about
what the X community was up to and where improvement was needed.
However, it was not a community-generating process, as only the people
at the other open source booths were potential development community (or
development resources) in my estimate, and I think I could have
disseminated more information and generated more excitement about X
through writing a few more blog posts than that trip did.  To put it
more bluntly: I think pretty much what we got out of that trip was that
I ended up with a Xorg sticker on my laptop.  Then I upgraded laptops.

I think it's much better to bring X developers to general (or
X-specific, of course) open-source conferences where we can work with
other developers, both within the X community and outside of it.  We get
clear results both by improving X on the spot and by making better
decisions as to where development should go.

-- 
Eric Anholt                             anholt at FreeBSD.org
eric at anholt.net                         eric.anholt at intel.com
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