[OSGeo-Discuss] [location-iwg] FOSDEM 2015: proposal for a geospatial devroom

[Johan Van de Wauw]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Martin Hammitzsch
<martin.hammitzsch at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Johan,
>
> I am bit lost in understanding the format of devrooms. First I was
> thinking of a space where developers meet for pitching their ideas and
> forming groups to get their hands dirty in 1-3 days of collaborative
> ideas generation, of drafting concepts, and of programming. But then I
> read something about talks and checked the schedule of FOSDEM 2014 -
> it seems that a devroom is something similar to a session or track we
> know from other conferences and thus contains lots of talks instead of
> programming. However, at least the talks seem to be from programmers
> for programmers. Nevertheless, I am a bit confused.
>
> I very much like the idea of a geospatial devroom. But I would be
> happy to clarify first what format you and others have in mind - just
> talks, unconference, hackdays, ..., a mix of it? Please let me know
> what you have in mind.
>

Martin,

Thanks for your comments. I've been at FOSDEM so many years that I
just assumed everyone would understand.

Indeed, until now most devrooms were more or less like conference
talks, but as you say from developer to developer. I think we should
more or less keep to this type of schedule if we want to attract
people from other projects to the room. If we just don't have
something catchy on the schedule people from outside our projects may
be unlikely to join.
This being said I think we could definitely add one timeslot where
everyone in the room can present quickly his ideas. Or timeslots where
we can have a collaborative discussion eg "Let's build openaerialmap".
 I think it would be useful to have at least timeslots with a title
and a description for the schedule to lure in other developers.

Everything above is just my opinion and I should add that I little or
no experience with going to any unconferences/... and I'm really open
to any other suggestions and ideas.

Johan