[FOSDEM] requirement to start a devroom

[Daniel Pocock]

On 02/07/17 00:48, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> 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.
> 

This suggestion didn't make any comment about how the work would be
done, there was no part of my email that suggested the work would be
shifted to the core team.

To completely put the idea into practice, it would be important to
consider how to engage existing dev-room managers to manage the tags
and/or rooms.

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