[Foss4g2009] Workshop Logistics

[Paul Ramsey]

I think Gavin's three-pronged approach might not be bad, particularly
if you use it to expand the offerings you have while not expanding
your infrastructure costs.

The hardest thing about the workshops is the computers. They cost lost
of money, they take lots of time to wrangle around. If you can get
workshops running in empty rooms set up with class room tables, and
the teachers taking all responsibility for the materials, you've just
added to your offerings without increasing your workload.

I've done BYOComputer workshops, just specifying "windows required"
and providing MS4W. It's worked "OK", but usually 10% of the attendees
just can't get it to work. Security settings, or DLLs that MS4W
expects but they don't have, something fails. So there is a set of
people who are less than happey.

Live DVD *will* have some problems. We had some workshops at 2007 on
LiveDVD (I think?) and again, there was a percentage of attendees who
just couldn't get the things to boot. Or, rather, a percentage of the
machines we had *rented* would refuse to boot them (Dave solved this
by swapping the sessions to rooms which had computers that like the
DVDs, if I recall). Which means that if we had BYOC, there would have
been people who couldn't boot.

The reason I suggest VMWare is mainly because I expect (in an totally
unproven way) that the rate of failure on arbitrary hardware will be
lower than with Live*D.

If you commit to a *totally*vmware* strategy, you could change the
pricing model of the workshops quite dramatically, by saying $X per
workshop + $Y if you require a computer, otherwise bring a computer
with VMWare installed and the following minimum hardware.

Paul


2008/10/22 Bruce Bannerman <bruce at bannerman.id.au>:
> On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 06:34 -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote:
>> I'm not sure if 2008 did any workshops in computerless rooms, but if
>> they did I'd like to hear how that went. The "low impact" workshop is
>> a category we haven't had before, but it allows the organizers to add
>> a workshop without the overhead of handling machinery.
>>
>> Another option for workshops which it might be time to explore is the
>> BYOLaptop + Virtual Machine approach. With VM players like VMWare
>> free-to-download, this is potentially a doable thing. Just have to
>> make VM images small enough to burn on a DVD.  Only downside is, we
>> generally want to teach on Windows, to keep it "real" for the majority
>> of attendees, but we can't burn 300 copies of Windows VMs onto DVDs.
>
>
> If we have to go down this route, I'd prefer to see Live DVDs with a
> Linux distro e.g. Ubuntu.
>
>
> Bruce
>
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