Re: FOSDEM Aftermath - the talks

[Nicolas Roard]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:36 PM, Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf
<lars.sonchocky-helldorf@hamburg.de> wrote:
> I'll write a couple of mails to the list during the next days covering
> several aspects (talks, the Dev-Room, the hotel and so on) of FOSDEM. I also
> recorded all sessions on video and I'll post them on some online video
> portal when I am done with some basic editing (adding a title mainly) of
> them.
>
>
> Some general words:
>
> - It was fun. All the work and dispair (because of the very slow start I was
> several times at the brink of giving it all up) finally paid of.

Thanks for your efforts.

> - Giving talks is fun. It was my first time and despite I had some crashes
> to fight during my talk it still was fun. I felt very content after it.
>
> - It's really nice to meet all the people you usually talk to only at the
> mailing list and the chat. Especially the dinner at saturday night is always
> a highlight (we went to a pretty decent indian restaurant this year)
>
> - Quite some people asked for a Live-CD of GNUstep. I know there are (were?)
> several ones, we had none. Also, most Live-CDs seem to be a little bit out
> of date meanwhile (at least that's what people told me). So it would be nice
> to have some good and up to date Live-CDs next year (Étoilé-folks and Gürkan
> are you listening?).
>
>
> Talks/Presentations:
>
> Interest was higher than I originally expected (I was going for the smallest
> room available if you remember), it was most of the time more than two-third
> full, in some talks the attendees even stood in the aisles. I also learned
> that it seems to be very important what headline you give to your talk. The
> more the attendees can imagine what the talk will be about the more likely
> they are willing to come. Being somewhat catchy here certainly helps while
> if you're using to many cryptic acronyms nobody knows (and if it's to early
> in the morning) you'll probably end up giving a private talk to some single
> person (despite giving a good talk) ;-)
>
> I have not exact counts or statistics but I had the impression that the
> Étoilé talk drew the most people, despite the somewhat difficult
> circumstances (basically, the "Pragmatic Smalltalk" talk was given twice,
> once via iChat by David Chisnall and the second time by a helpful friend of
> the Étoilé people (Sorry, I am not sure about his name - although having
> seen him the years before - was it David?)). Interesting here is also that
> nobody went out when not the originally planned "Étoilé" talk but he
> "Pragmatic Smalltalk" talk was given.

The helpful friend was Damien Pollet -- thanks a lot to him, as indeed
it's not a sinecure to give somebody's else talk.

>
> I also noticed that knowledge about GNUstep is still no very widespread.
> While we weren't getting those notorious "Ah, GNUstep, I use window maker
> too!" remarks we usually have gotten at the stand in the years before, the
> folks who came to the talks - already knowing GNUstep, otherwise you don't
> go to a talk I think - still were not aware of many things GNUstep has to
> offer. You always can impress them with Gorm for instance, most didn't know
> that and what GNUstep offers for theming nor do they know details about the
> frameworks. In essence you approach a lot of them at a quite basic level.
> O.k. there are some OPENSTEP veterans mixed in but a lot of the attendees
> would benefit from practical lessons about what for instance GNUstep base
> and GNUstep gui have to offer. Basically you have to give your attendees a
> reason to use GNUstep (for instance faster/easier app development,
> integration of apps created that way into their desktop environment of
> choice - develop once, deploy everywhere and such things). If you can offer
> them some benefit I think they'll be convinced. But that message has to be
> spread.

This is true that many people do not realise how powerful GNUstep or
Gorm can be, but to be fair to GNUstep, Cocoa has the same issues --
developers that never played with Cocoa do not think it's particularly
good or bad.
So showing off a bit some of the things (like Gorm) that do not really
have an equivalent elsewhere is an ideal step to interest developers
:)
(and frankly, Gorm is underused compared to its potential -- we could
have a lot of cool objects palettes adding interesting capabilities)

-- 
Nicolas Roard