On 07/04/2017 02:58 AM, cluker@plus.net wrote:
'Even without abolishing dev-rooms, it would still be possible to create tags for the talks in each room (e.g. some talks in the SDR room may have both an "sdr" and "ham" tag and some talks in other dev-rooms may have a "ham" tag too) and produce index pages on fosdem.org for every tag. Then if the Ham topic didn't get a dedicated dev-room, people interested in that topic could still see a list of all talks tagged "ham" in other rooms.
Regards,
Daniel'
This idea would absolutely get my backing, especially as due to the nature of the rooms ULB has available, some tracks must be in small rooms despite being popular. A tagging system that would let people assess talks by the content rather than the location seems to have a lot of potential.
Running a devroom also involves a lot of logistics, such as kicking people out when there's too many, reminding people to pick up trash, making sure all the talks are on time, etc. All of this is much easier when there's a devroom team running the devroom that's also familiar with all the topics and some of the speakers. Basically, I would recommend not doing anything that adds any amount of friction to the process. I'm assuming all devrooms are pretty much full all the time anyway; plus, they get recorded. And on top of that, FOSDEM orgs have been pretty good about accepting interesting talks into the main tracks. Your idea sounds good, but I doubt it adds more value than it adds overhead. Cheers, Martin