Post Is GUADEC just GDEC? | The best of Zeth

I am sitting now in the beautiful city of Tampere, the heart of the Finnish lake district. This city offered to host GUADEC but were refused, nuts, but if you read my recent post Exploring Technical Conference Demand and Supply, you will understand why.

In 2007, I went to GUADEC, the GNOME User and Developer European Conference hosted in Birmingham, it was an absolutely fabulous conference. It had the leading GNOME developers, great talks, great venue, great entertainment. The organisation was so good in fact that we completely copied much of the organisation for two other conferences that I have been involved in.

There was however one massive flaw, although the whole thing went over seven days, the main conference talks were in the week. There were a few hundred developers who had flown in from Europe, the USA, Latin America and so on. Apart from me there were three other people from Birmingham in attendance (if I don't include the nearby city of Wolverhampton then it was 1). They might have well held GUADEC on the moon.

Simply speaking, there were no users. This was a massive lost opportunity. They could have had the main talks over a weekend, dozens or hundreds of local people could have attended and learned more about GNOME, and the seeds of future developers could have been sown. How many potential new GNOME hackers live in Birmingham, Britain's second biggest city? A lot more than 4.

For GUADEC 2009, they had the choice of whether to have GUADEC in Tampere, Finland or Gran Canaria. So the developers, no doubt on expense accounts, chose Gran Canaria. I would vote for a week in the sun too. However, how many potential new GNOME hackers live in Tampere, Finland's second biggest city, home to two universities and a host of IT companies? How many potential new GNOME developers live in the tourist destination of Las Palmas?

To fly from England to Tampere, costs £40 on Ryanair from Stansted Airport. The cheapest I can find to fly from England to Gran Canaria in July 2009, the height of the tourist season, costs £230 if I book today, which I cannot because the GUADEC organisers have not announced the date. It will cost £300-400 if I book after new year.

If the GNOME conference is a corporate expenses fueled jolly for full-time developers, then please be honest about it. Don't call it a user conference or a community conference, it is not. GUADEC should be called GDEC or GNOME Developer Summit or similar. Someone else can then set up a community conference aimed at everyone.

So even though I, as just a GNOME user, will not join them, I wish the GNOME developers will have a good time on the beach in 2009, and especially since the KDE developers will be there in the same venue. Hopefully they will co-orporate more and remove some of the more redundant competition with each other. The free desktop needs to compete with OS X and Windows not with itself.

5 thoughts on “Is GUADEC just GDEC?”

I live in Tenerife, next to Gran Canaria. And for me is amazing to have the opportunity to go to an event like this with little expenses.
I think that the point is not the number of potential new hackers who lives in X. If we think this way then the majority of the tech events should be hosted in California. Choosing a different place every year is a good way to give people with less resources of time or money the opportunity to enjoy a great event like this.

As someone who was involved in the choice the truth is we took into account many considerations. There were in fact three choices this year and the only one that the KDE and GNOME selection groups could agree upon was Gran Canaria. Note that Spain itself has a huge number of GNOME developers and Gran Canaria had an excellent proposal. As for costs it was determined that for European residence all locations on average were of equivalent costs. The tipping point was both that KDE had agreed to Gran Canaria and the costs while you are there are significantly lower. Corporate sponsorship did not enter into the decision (and in fact the more expensive the conference the less people can go from my company). If you feel you can afford the trip but have something to offer to the conference please apply for sponsorship from GNOME. I haven't gone over the budgets yet but the way the Grand Canaria proposal was scheduled we may have a larger budget for sponsoring people next year.
As any time we are presented with a choice, we had to make a decision and not everyone is going to be happy. We sympathise with your frustration but please know we don't make these decisions lightly. It is always our goal to grow GNOME and make the conferences accessible to the widest audience possible. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.

It's kinda surprising that you see Gran Canaria as "just" a tourist destination, but do not mention that Finland is the second most expensive country in the world. Like John already mentioned, the GNOME and KDE boards agreed that the cost of getting to all three proposed locations is about the same from inside Europe. When you get there though, Gran Canaria is a lot cheaper, which means students can actually eat and drink there, where they can't in Finland.
As for being remote, it really is not. Gran Canaria is much more within reach from Spain, and GNOME has a huge user base and developer base in Spain.
Anyway, someone is going to be unhappy no matter what decisions are made.

Thanks for the comments people. One thing:
Finland is the second most expensive country
Expensive for what exactly? It is much cheaper than the UK where I live.
When you go to a conference and spend 10 hours per day in lecture rooms, what do you actually buy?

Two separate ideas here:
First: Is not the competition between KDE and GNOME a good thing? It drives both to improve in a way that Mac and Windows and Linux and 'everyone else' can't relative to each other. A user has the ability to install KDE or GNOME on almost any Posix system at will, with few consequences to application compatibility or loss of functionality! You can run GNOME apps on KDE, and KDE apps on GNOME. If folks could do this when switching between, say, Windows and Linux, and didn't have to worry about losing games or office or something, it would force the two systems to both improve!
Second: John (J5) Palmieri:
As someone involved in the decision of venue, are you also involved in the dates that people speak at the conference? Zeth said that most of the speakers were found during the week, which could alienate GNOME users from the conference since they have to work during the week. This depends on who was speaking during the week though. Most GNOME users aren't going to care about a talk on programming back-end functions for GNOME, they're going to care about new features, fixed problems, etc. When were these talks held? Perhaps some of these should be held on weekends, and some on weekdays. You could weight the talks on a scale with 'Purely interesting to developers' on one end, and 'Purely interesting to users' at the other, find out what days conferences are usually user heavy, and what days conferences are usually dev heavy, and then schedule talks accordingly. Maybe make a poll on the GNOME/GUADEC website! Is this done currently?

Lucio Albenga on August 7, 2008 at 07:25 p.m. said:

I live in Tenerife, next to Gran Canaria. And for me is amazing to have the opportunity to go to an event like this with little expenses.
I think that the point is not the number of potential new hackers who lives in X. If we think this way then the majority of the tech events should be hosted in California. Choosing a different place every year is a good way to give people with less resources of time or money the opportunity to enjoy a great event like this.
John (J5) Palmieri on August 9, 2008 at 06:44 p.m. said:

As someone who was involved in the choice the truth is we took into account many considerations. There were in fact three choices this year and the only one that the KDE and GNOME selection groups could agree upon was Gran Canaria. Note that Spain itself has a huge number of GNOME developers and Gran Canaria had an excellent proposal. As for costs it was determined that for European residence all locations on average were of equivalent costs. The tipping point was both that KDE had agreed to Gran Canaria and the costs while you are there are significantly lower. Corporate sponsorship did not enter into the decision (and in fact the more expensive the conference the less people can go from my company). If you feel you can afford the trip but have something to offer to the conference please apply for sponsorship from GNOME. I haven't gone over the budgets yet but the way the Grand Canaria proposal was scheduled we may have a larger budget for sponsoring people next year.
As any time we are presented with a choice, we had to make a decision and not everyone is going to be happy. We sympathise with your frustration but please know we don't make these decisions lightly. It is always our goal to grow GNOME and make the conferences accessible to the widest audience possible. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.
behdad on August 10, 2008 at 08:32 p.m. said:

It's kinda surprising that you see Gran Canaria as "just" a tourist destination, but do not mention that Finland is the second most expensive country in the world. Like John already mentioned, the GNOME and KDE boards agreed that the cost of getting to all three proposed locations is about the same from inside Europe. When you get there though, Gran Canaria is a lot cheaper, which means students can actually eat and drink there, where they can't in Finland.
As for being remote, it really is not. Gran Canaria is much more within reach from Spain, and GNOME has a huge user base and developer base in Spain.
Anyway, someone is going to be unhappy no matter what decisions are made.
zeth on August 11, 2008 at 01:11 p.m. said:

Thanks for the comments people. One thing:
Finland is the second most expensive country
Expensive for what exactly? It is much cheaper than the UK where I live.
When you go to a conference and spend 10 hours per day in lecture rooms, what do you actually buy?
Mark (Cycom on freenode) on August 23, 2008 at 10:07 a.m. said:

Two separate ideas here:
First: Is not the competition between KDE and GNOME a good thing? It drives both to improve in a way that Mac and Windows and Linux and 'everyone else' can't relative to each other. A user has the ability to install KDE or GNOME on almost any Posix system at will, with few consequences to application compatibility or loss of functionality! You can run GNOME apps on KDE, and KDE apps on GNOME. If folks could do this when switching between, say, Windows and Linux, and didn't have to worry about losing games or office or something, it would force the two systems to both improve!
Second: John (J5) Palmieri:
As someone involved in the decision of venue, are you also involved in the dates that people speak at the conference? Zeth said that most of the speakers were found during the week, which could alienate GNOME users from the conference since they have to work during the week. This depends on who was speaking during the week though. Most GNOME users aren't going to care about a talk on programming back-end functions for GNOME, they're going to care about new features, fixed problems, etc. When were these talks held? Perhaps some of these should be held on weekends, and some on weekdays. You could weight the talks on a scale with 'Purely interesting to developers' on one end, and 'Purely interesting to users' at the other, find out what days conferences are usually user heavy, and what days conferences are usually dev heavy, and then schedule talks accordingly. Maybe make a poll on the GNOME/GUADEC website! Is this done currently?