[asterisk-users] Astricon question: four or five tracks?

[John Todd]

We're busily churning away at creating the Astricon 
(http://www.astricon.net/) talk track this year, and it's been 
delayed by a problem that we've never had in years past: too many 
high-quality talk submissions.   Not a bad problem to have, but still 
a problem.

We have four tracks on the schedule:

  1) Business Track - this relates to things like creating business 
models around Asterisk, technologies that embed aspects of Asterisk 
into their platforms, discussions of open source in the marketplace, 
and new technologies that can be added to Asterisk for specific 
application delivery reasons, among other topics.

  2) Technology Track - Intro/Intermediate - Topics here range from 
basic introductions to Asterisk  as far as feature sets and 
capabilities, and even into the moderately challenging topics of 
introductions to embedded systems and case studies.

  3) Technology Track - Advanced - This includes more advanced 
implementation studies, protocol topics, new Asterisk features (LUA, 
for example), and inner workings of various Asterisk and third-party 
components.

  4) Technology Track - Call Center/Large Scale - More case studies 
here but focused on large-scale systems.  Carrier issues such as call 
recording, conferencing, clustering, and call center topics.


We have had an overwhelming number of top-notch technical submissions 
for talks this year, which has been GREAT.  Last year, we heard that 
there was a desire for even more technical tracks, so this year will 
fulfill that need.  But we're stuck - we have way more topics than we 
have slots in the 4-track schedule, and so we've hit an impasse. 
We've had to start looking at cutting some really interesting topics 
because we simply don't have the space in the schedule.  This is a 
terrible position, and so we're looking for what we can do to fix the 
problem.

The obvious choice is "Well, why don't you add a fifth track?"  So 
that is why I'm putting this message out.  It's possible for us to 
add a fifth advanced technical track, but that would mean that there 
would be at any one time FIVE talks happening, four of which would be 
technical, and three of which would be classified as "advanced".  It 
will certainly be the case that there are overlapping areas of 
interest.  Even with a fifth track, we are STILL going to have to 
turn down a few of the requests in the queue because of lack of 
slots, and at this point extending the conference another day is a 
very difficult option due to the hotel scheduling which is done far 
in advance.  We also had some feedback from years past that a two-day 
conference seemed to suit everyone's schedules better, so this may be 
some unintended consequences from the compression.

Our question to the community is:

      Is it too much to have 5 talk tracks at Astricon?

Our initial instinct is "Go ahead and do it" but this does sound like 
a question that should be posed to the people who will attend.  Your 
opinion would be valued if you could take the time to reply, but 
please try to summarize at the top of any replies with a "Yes" or 
"No" (even if you have more things to say) so I can keep a bit closer 
eye on the reply volumes.  Feel free to reply on or off list.

JT

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John Todd              jtodd at digium.com
Asterisk Open Source Community Director