[FOSDEM] requirement to start a devroom

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Sat, Jul 01, 2017 at 10:01:29PM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> Given the level of competition that exists for dev-rooms, why not
> consider abolishing them completely and having talks grouped by tags?

That misses the reason for the existence of devrooms in the first place.

It's not "to group talks of the same subject in the same room", although that's
an interesting side effect of them.

Instead, devrooms are organized by people who are not part of the FOSDEM
team. This means we can delegate things like hunting down speakers,
getting them to confirm they'll be at the event, building schedules
based on the constraints of those speakers (some of whom will have to
leave early or have more than one talk, etc etc) and on things like
"these two talks are about generally the same subject", and a whole slew
of other things.

If the devrooms were organized by the FOSDEM team rather than by the
devroom organizers, the amount of work that would have been done by the
core team would quickly be more than we have time for. And besides
organizing the schedule, we also have to deal with a large number of
other matters involved in the schedule.

If you can come up with a way to improve coordination across devrooms so
that talks can more easily be moved from one devroom to another, then by
all means do suggest, and we'll see what we can do; but any such scheme
that would involve "more work from the core team" is doomed before it
will even get started, because that's just not an option.

Regards,

-- 
Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!?

  -- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008
     Hacklab