Hi Koki and all, > Who talked about a professional, business-style conference? I chose the wrong paragraph to quote in my email. You mentioned to determine content you need to agree on goals, I was making the point that to agree on goals one must have a target audience in mind, and suggested the professional developer with no Haiku knowledge was not a sensible target audience. Apologies if my presentation implied that was your suggestion, that wasn't intentional. Now I will not attempt to reply to all your points individually as I don't want my core argument to be lost. Hopefully I'll deal with some of them below though. What type of people is Haiku looking for now? I'd say some more developers may be useful (we've just had an influx of GSoCers so too many more would make it hard for Axel to police the coding-guideline-conformity of every new check-in!) Also we can build awareness in the group that is open to trying new OSes as users, people in the Linux community for example, who may be interested in taking a look at Haiku when it is released. It is important for the developers to move along the awareness->understanding pathway you mentioned, but for the casual interested users I would settle for awareness->"maintained interest" for now. For them interest can be maintained simply by having an active website and community. Certainly I wouldn't expect those people to pay large sums of money to attend a Haiku conference, regardless of content - it's not as though there's any really cool Haiku end-user apps in development that they might like to see demoed. So then we move to the potential Haiku developers. If these people are to be successful contributors to the project, they will be required to work things out for themselves and work independently and remotely from other contributors. If they are unable to work out what to do given good web resources (more on that below) they are unlikely to be good long term contributors to the project. If I attended an event like SCaLE, saw Haiku demoed and picked up a flyer, what would I do? My first step would be to look at the website for more information. I might then go into the IRC channel to meet people and chat about the project, and get my questions answered "live". Only then would I consider going to a conference on the OS. Although it's true that some people prefer presentations as a way of picking up information - paying $100s and spending a weekend to see a presentation on the BeAPI is a much bigger barrier to entry than just reading the BeBook online. In order to allow as many potential developers as possible to gain the understanding required to take the plunge it would be good to have information available in different forms. But why limit the presentation audience to those who can afford the time and money to attend WC? Why not use the web? If developers (or even non-haiku devs who know the BeAPI - I might even be persuaded to get the ball rolling) could produce and record video presentations we could host them on the website and hugely increase the reach of the information - especially among the target very-web-savvy audience. If new presentations were made on a semi-regular basis it would keep people coming back to the website, both making the project look active and providing a new introductory path in Haiku development for people. Note this is different from simply providing a video of a live talk - the videos are actually intended for a web audience, can be edited so the slides are digital rather than recorded from a projector, could contain associated sample code downloads, could be part of an ongoing series rather than a one-off event, and don't make web users feel as though they missed out from not attending the latest WC. Bringing it back to WC - I think it's still good to have an event to meet up with other people, but no-one outside the regulars are likely to spend the time and effort to attend. If people are willing to create presentation-style content, Haiku's limited time and resources would be far better spent creating the content for a web audience - making it available to a greatly larger audience, at a time that suits them. Koki, if you still believe WC as an event holds real unique power to attract new people outside the regulars - then what group of people do you think they are, and what content is there that would attract them that wouldn't be better available to everyone on the web? Simon ps: grr, I really intended this to be a short email! ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam