Minor remarks about DebianDay at LinuxTag 2005

Hi,

moderating the Debian Day was a lot of fun, even if I was not
able to see much of LinuxTag itself as a result.

Many thanks to the organiser(s), the speakers, and the audience:
Everything went smoothly, with only very minor issues. People
stayed patient, when technical or schedule problems arose.

In general, the talks were good and the survey showed
significantly more positive reactions than negative ones.

The participation was good:

  Debian Security: 70
  Debian Women Project: 60
  Kerberos V5 mit Debian: 50
  Debian Archive Structure: 35
  The Volatile Archive: 30
  Knowledge, Power and free Beer: 30
  m23 Distribution System: 25
  Ubuntu Development Model: 20
  Backporting Practice: 12 (cancelled)
  i18n & l10n: 12
  OCaml @ Debian: 12
  Porting to the m32r Architecture: 5

Of course, the more specialised the subject, the lower the
participation. "Porting to the m32r Architecture" had the bad
luck of competing with "Free Software with a female touch" and a
slightly misleading title.

Next time, we should not change between different projectors
and/or laptop computers, but ask for the slides before. More
than the half of the laptop computers did not work with the
projectors and we lost time in making everything work. Maybe I
can bring a projector next time.

Also, we have to make sure for every single talk, whether it
will be given or not. And they need to make sure, that talks
start somewhat on time.

Side note 1: My personal favourites were "Debian Women Project"
(interesting talk, no typos in the slides, cool jokes) and the
"Porting to the m32r Architecture", which was in fact a talk
about Debian portability and cross-buildability in general and
deserved more attention.

Side note 2: Most people used either the LaTeX "beamer" class or
OpenOffice to generate the slides, magicpoint is used less
often. Nobody seems to know about docbook-slides, so I have to
give a talk just to change that.

Checklist for the next time:

  [ ] there is a laptop computer, with firefox, gromit,
      magicpoint, openoffice, and xpdf
  [ ] there is a projector
  [ ] there is a long (~4m) VGA cable
  [ ] there are two Kensington locks, one for the laptop, one
      for the projector
  [ ] there is a talks overview slide, that is shown between the
      talks
  [ ] the screensaver is switched off
  [ ] all slides are readable (typical problems are missing
      transparency in XPDF, missing CJK fonts, missing right
      third of the slide on the projection)
  [ ] there are not too many typos in the slides
  [ ] feedback forms are on all chairs before the talk
  [ ] there are cheap pens on some chairs for the feedback forms
  [ ] there is water for the speakers (both cold and tepid,
      the latter is much better for the voice)

See you in HEL,

-- 
W. Borgert <debacle@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~debacle/
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