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Conferences

gnat on 2002-03-22T23:05:20

Here's an interesting point of view. I've been to conferences where each session was 90m, and was bored out of my mind.

On the other hand, as conference organizers we'd need to give a lot fewer freebies as there'd be fewer presenters. On the gripping hand, if you thought we rejected too many people for the 28 45m speaking slots (not including tutorials) at this year's Perl Conference, you'd really be pissed off if we only had 14 90m speaking slots.

Any preference?

--Nat

too (long | short)

kasei on 2002-03-23T00:49:30

Were all presentations to be 90m long, some would be far too long, and a few might be too short. I've enjoyed how TPC has had varying length presentations with the possibility of BOF sessions later on if there is enough interest to warrant more time.



Also, having fewer speakers (as a result of longer timeslots) would, IMHO, be a hindrance - having a wide variety of topics through sheer numbers is nice.

she's spot on

hfb on 2002-03-25T03:35:39

short is more 'user friendly' since, if people wanted to sit in a class all day long they could pay a lot less and attend something locally.

Re:she's spot on

gnat on 2002-03-25T20:07:12

My reading of Meg's article is that she wanted longer sessions: Last fall at the O'Reilly P2P & Web Services Conference I noticed that the short sessions (45 minutes) prevented every relevant point from being addressed and discussed..

Vote for shorter sessions recorded. Everything in 2002 will be 45m because we had complaints that mixing 20m and 45m and 90m talks meant it was difficult to move around between talks. It's pointless us throwing our hands up and saying "but you're not supposed to be moving around!", people do what they want to. So we try to make them happy.

Moral of the story: I should give up and go back to the good old days when the only goal was to build a conference that I'd want to see, and I didn't have to worry about attendee feedback, user profiles, session balancing, and all that other bullshit. :-)

--Nat

Re:she's spot on

hfb on 2002-03-25T21:46:51

Hmm..maybe I should reread it but I got the impression that she thought the short talks provided enough of a spark to get people to talk about points of interest after the talks and at the socials....which is true. Listening to people drone on for hours is far less interesting than having a more personal conversation over a beer in the evening. If 45mins isn't enough to present the nugget of information, 90mins isn't likely to either save for making it longer. That's what the hallways and parties are for :)

Short Talks ++

mir on 2002-03-25T07:18:01

My votes goes to mostly short talks. It allows for a wider variety of topics to be presented, for the occasional joke (Davorg's talk at last year's TPC comes to my mind) and allows the attendees to avoid the "trapped here for one more hour" feeling.
Long presentation should really be reserved for short tutorials, ie the speaker could actually talk for 4 hours about the subject. The presentations that I like best are either "look, this is something cool, go back home and learn more about it" or "here is a problem in the community|language|tools, here is a proposed solution, let's talk about it". Both can fit in a 35mn talk + 10 mn questions + additional reading or discussions after the talk.