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

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 06:34:26PM -0700, John Todd wrote:
> I did receive one objection so far to the fifth track because of the 
> fear of missing a good talk in the other four tracks.  However, I'm 
> not sure how we overcome that problem if we don't add the track, as 
> we would have to dump 11 talks if we didn't have that additional room 
> for speakers, meaning that the results would be identical: some good 
> talks would not be able to be seen.

In fact, no, John, it's worse: if you schedule the 5th track, *some*
percentage of the attendees may find a conflict, and have to miss a
presentation.

If you *don't* schedule the 5th track, *100%* of the attendees will not
see any of those 11 speakers.

> The suggestion by you and others of creating videos of the talks is a 
> good one, and we had already started the discovery process of 
> determining cost for doing just that.  If we determine that it is 
> within the budget, our goal would be to make the videos available to 
> conference attendees as soon as possible after the talks are over to 
> allow participants to see the talks that they had missed due to 
> scheduling.  This decision and arrangement is still pending, but 
> we're hoping that we can do this to address the concerns of 
> overlapping tracks.  More on this hopefully soon.  I would suspect 
> that most (but possibly not all) of the videos would be available 
> only to attendees if such a videography can be arranged.

If your agreements with the speakers permit, you should probably not
restrict sales to registered attendees; as I noted before, the reports
I hear from conference arrangers seems to suggest that the videos won't
cannibalize the show; hell, NANOG streams them, *and* gives the videos
away for free...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
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