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

[Matt Florell]

Hello,

I would recommend that if you do add another tech track that you spend
a great deal of effort trying to make sure that sessions that would
appeal to similar audiances are not done at the same time. This has
happened a few times in past Astricons and it's always a tough choice
for attendees that are interested in both talks to choose between
them.

To this end, I might suggest even video-recording the presentations to
be replayed at night during the conference(or possibly on the web) so
attendees can see what they missed if they were unable to sit in on a
presentation.

One other suggestion I might make is that after 6PM I think there
might be a benefit from loosly structured BOF or discussion sessions.
There is only so much Red Bull and Alcohol you can drink in the code
zone. I quickly organized two after-hours discussion sessions during
last year's Astricon and actually had a few dozen people involved in
each one, it would be great if this could be done on a larger scale
and officially organized.

Thanks,

MATT---

On 6/12/08, John Todd <jtodd at digium.com> wrote:
>
>  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
>
>  --
>  --
>  John Todd              jtodd at digium.com
>  Asterisk Open Source Community Director
>
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