Distributions

No, it was actually better. The goal was 200 people, with a good mix between Novell employees and community contributors. We actually did better than 200, I think between 215 and 230 people -- I haven't gotten the final number yet, as I had to leave on Sunday.

And the actual participation was fabulous. People were great at being self-starting and setting up their own sessions and generally making things happen once they were there. We had a great conference, and I think most people were very happy having attended. The only consistent complaint, which was expected and unavoidable, was that there was no open network for participants except for a bunch of wired connections in the front room for people to get email, etc., and for presenters to use.

The facility simply wasn't geared to handle our kind of bandwidth needs, so we decided no network was better than a crappy one -- plus, we did want people to actually talk to one another. Some people have actually suggested having no network next time as well.

Very successful, I think -- people had enough structure to have some idea what to expect when they showed up, and then also enough freedom to plan their own activities. I hate going to conferences where you have no slack time and no way to talk to other people with similar interests without just skipping out entirely or staying extra days. So this gave people room to be part of a "general" conference while still addressing their specific areas of interest. The GNOME team, for instance, headed back to the SUSE office to do a bunch of bug triage, which was awesome.

In general, I would like to do more pre-planning next time, more to get upstreams involved, but overall I think this went very well.

Due to the network issue, of course, we weren't able to be inclusive for people who couldn't attend physically, and that was disappointing.