[openbeos] Re: Waltercon 07

Hi Ithamar,

Ithamar R. Adema wrote:

Hi All,

On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 02:43 -0400, Koki wrote:
I agree with Bryan. I am a firm believer that WalterCon has great potential as a tool to grow the developer's community. But I also 
think that for this potential to be realized there needs to be radical
change on how this event is approached, from the small circle get
together that it is now into a more organized and thought out event
that caters to a wider audience with content that has *compelling*
perceived value.
I suggested that WC be held in Europe this year because most of the active Haiku developers are there, so your chances of getting more of them under the same roof is much higher, increasing thus the 
possibility of putting together a program that can be *more*
attractive to a *broader* target audience. 

Finally I get a chance to disagree with you Koki :)

I think WalterCon should stay in the USA. Not that I wouldn't like to
meet Michael Phipps again, or any of the other American Haiku devs, but
because we have an event in Europe (BeGeistert), and the more 'ground'
we cover, the better.

However, we could have BeGeistert first (time-line wise), and if we
could actually prepare material for this, share this with the people
organizing WalterCon. That way we would share the effort on content.

BeGeistert's content has always been determined by the people visiting,
and while a lot of BeOS developers and users were always there, the
content has been limited quite often, just because too few people
prepared something more then a small presentation (myself included).

So I think we would be better off starting a discussion what kind of
content we would like to handle on these more technically oriented
meetings, and if other people step up, I would be more then willing to
create some presentation(s) about e.g. driver development or some such.

Lets start with focusing on the content first, and then see if there's
an actual need to move WalterCon out of the USA.
I agree with Ithamar that content is of the highest priority; and given the high concentration of Haiku developers in Europe, it is pretty easy to tell on which side of the pond you are more likely to get more and better technical content for the conference. Granted, you don't have to be a core Haiku dev regularly contributing code to give a technical presentation; but having presentations by the core devs *with name recognition* is what will give the highest value to the event (or the highest ROI, as they say in business).
Furthermore, if Haiku wants to cater to a broader audience beyond the small BeOS circle, then the BG model is not adequate. Given the visibility gained by Haiku through the recent marcom push, scaling down WC to become a subset of BG would be a big wasted opportunity. Also, and perhaps even more importantly, holding WC as an independent event is crucial from the perspective of building and reinforcing Haiku's own brand identity. Nothing against BG or its organizers: but if you think what's in the best interest of advancing Haiku, then WalterCon should be done separately with its own agenda. 

All of the above, IMHO, of course. :)

Cheers,

Koki

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