[Scale-planning] S7X Speaker Tracks - quantity & type?

[Phil Dibowitz]

> Orv Beach wrote:
>> In an effort to be more open, SCALE has decided to move some of the 
>> discussion (planning - doh) for SCALE 7x to the SCALE-planning list.

Bravo! This is fantastic.

>> 3 main tracks (as usual)
>> 1 beginner track
>> 1 developer track
>> 1 lab tutorial track (??)

So in the past the "main" tracks tended to fall into categories, even if
unofficial. In recent years there was usually one that tended towards
desktop, one that tended towards kernel/sysamdin/low-level and one that
was all the other stuff. Patterns vary for different years.

So how do you see the "3 main tracks?" I can tell you that with the
exception of Stormy Peter's talk, my favorite talks are always pretty
close to the kernel. At the original SCALE some of you probably remember
that despite being very busy as the technical chair and "power
balancer," I made very sure I got to see Robert Love's talk on the 2.5
kernel. Andrew Morton's two talks were amazing. The Zumastor talk 2
years ago was a particular highlight. Checkpoints, containers and live
migration was a great one this year. Of course some of the devel ones
are also on my favorites list: the parrot talk. And by definition
anything SA I'm interested in such as Puppet.

But you don't care about my personal interests, so I'll get to the real
point. I think it's very important to not just distinguish between
"areas" like desktop, devel, user, SA. I think it's also important to
distinguish between low level and high level. Lots of high level talks
are available at lots of LUGs and conferences. One of my favorite things
about SCALE has always been the fact that there's always some extremely
low-level talks as well. Something that digs deep into something and
doesn't assume you know nothing about it. These talks aren't for
everyone, but neither are the overview-type talks.

So, for example, a "developer track" seems like a "low level" track, but
if it's "comparing the three big P languages" that could be at a very
high level suitable for newbie programmers ("perl is good at string
manipulation and python has a more traditional OO approach with a more
mature OO feature set", etc.), or it could be very low-level ("perl's
internal regex compiler works like this...").

So I think it's very important not to just split up by category but also
to ensure that a certain percentage of talks across various tracks are
at a very low level for that track. For example, a desktop track may dig
deep into the various RPC and message bus systems that various desktop
environments use, how they work, and the pros and cons. That's much more
low level than your "what's new in Ubuntu" talk. Both talks are
important though.

So that's in general. Specifically, I recommend getting in touch with
Robert Love again and Greg K-H. Both like giving talks and are fantastic
at it. Andrew Morton is obviously always a favorite, although since he's
been twice, perhaps hitting up Robert and Greg may be a better place to
start.

Hopefully that is some useful feedback.

-- 
Phil Dibowitz                             phil at ipom.com
Open Source software and tech docs        Insanity Palace of Metallica
http://www.phildev.net/                   http://www.ipom.com/

"Never write it in C if you can do it in 'awk';
 Never do it in 'awk' if 'sed' can handle it;
 Never use 'sed' when 'tr' can do the job;
 Never invoke 'tr' when 'cat' is sufficient;
 Avoid using 'cat' whenever possible" -- Taylor's Laws of Programming


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