[Libre-soc-dev] FOSDEM Scheduling

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wednesday, December 13, 2023, Andrey Miroshnikov via Libre-soc-dev <
libre-soc-dev at lists.libre-soc.org> wrote:

> I haven't added breaks

they WILL be needed. absolutely no question. have you run
a conference or been to FOSS conferences before?

> (which we could do,

must and will, absolutely no question.

> although I already interspersed smaller talks in between to
> give presenters such as Sadoon a break).

that leaves no safety margin for overrun.

changeover of laptops is always a pain.
they should be tested *in advance* or preferably
*one* machine used, under no circumstances disconnected,
and all speakers provide PDF (1280x720 or better
800x600 *DEFINITELY NO GREATER*) on USB stick.

do not even assume the laptop has a guaranteed internet
connection.

this is 25 years of doing and attending conferences speaking here

i suggest putting tobias's talk last as he will
almost certainly want to connect up his own equipment
(demo).

> We've received a notification from Seth Hillbrand suggesting that a talk
on his track might be a better fit with us:
> "FOSS CAD/EDA tools supporting the open access PDK initiative"
> https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2024/submissions/NKUCXV/
> The proposed talk duration is 25min, so we can trim 5 min of another talk
and will be able to fit this additional talk in.

that would be good to accomodate. i have asked seth to give
some idea of its content.


> I suggest reducing the biginteger talk from 30min to 25min to allow for
this, as well as trimming Sadoon's crypto talk from 30min to 25min,

do both.

> to allow for an extra 5min in either of James' talks which I could use to
link to previous LibreSOC talks, and give the general focus of the project
(Libre designed SoC, Simple-V vectorisation).

the more break time in between the better.

5 mins in between every other talk gives "overrun" time.
back-to-back for 3-4 hours is a total exhaustion overwhelm
absolute guaranteed. don't do it.

the FOSDEM organisers will provide "countdown" timers andnotifications
signs for *us* to show to speakers. operating
at the front these will be shown to the speaker to advise them
without interrupting their flow to the audience.
we will have to be PAYING ATTENTION, and be ALERT the
whole time.

breaks are absolutely essential even just to catch
a breath and hand over to other talk team members without
disrupting the speakers by having to leave the room
(disruption) to hold a conversation (disruption) which
you can't even do because catching the attention (disruption)
of the person running the timer is something you simply
cannot do.

in case you had not guessed running a devroom is a LOT of work.

l.


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