VoIP Mailing List Archives

[jtodd at digium.com]

We're busily churning away at creating the Astricon
(http://www.astricon.net/) talk track this year, and it's been
delayed by a problem that we've never had in years past: too many
high-quality talk submissions. Not a bad problem to have, but still
a problem.

We have four tracks on the schedule:

1) Business Track - this relates to things like creating business
models around Asterisk, technologies that embed aspects of Asterisk
into their platforms, discussions of open source in the marketplace,
and new technologies that can be added to Asterisk for specific
application delivery reasons, among other topics.

2) Technology Track - Intro/Intermediate - Topics here range from
basic introductions to Asterisk as far as feature sets and
capabilities, and even into the moderately challenging topics of
introductions to embedded systems and case studies.

3) Technology Track - Advanced - This includes more advanced
implementation studies, protocol topics, new Asterisk features (LUA,
for example), and inner workings of various Asterisk and third-party
components.

4) Technology Track - Call Center/Large Scale - More case studies
here but focused on large-scale systems. Carrier issues such as call
recording, conferencing, clustering, and call center topics.
We have had an overwhelming number of top-notch technical submissions
for talks this year, which has been GREAT. Last year, we heard that
there was a desire for even more technical tracks, so this year will
fulfill that need. But we're stuck - we have way more topics than we
have slots in the 4-track schedule, and so we've hit an impasse.
We've had to start looking at cutting some really interesting topics
because we simply don't have the space in the schedule. This is a
terrible position, and so we're looking for what we can do to fix the
problem.

The obvious choice is "Well, why don't you add a fifth track?" So
that is why I'm putting this message out. It's possible for us to
add a fifth advanced technical track, but that would mean that there
would be at any one time FIVE talks happening, four of which would be
technical, and three of which would be classified as "advanced". It
will certainly be the case that there are overlapping areas of
interest. Even with a fifth track, we are STILL going to have to
turn down a few of the requests in the queue because of lack of
slots, and at this point extending the conference another day is a
very difficult option due to the hotel scheduling which is done far
in advance. We also had some feedback from years past that a two-day
conference seemed to suit everyone's schedules better, so this may be
some unintended consequences from the compression.

Our question to the community is:

Is it too much to have 5 talk tracks at Astricon?

Our initial instinct is "Go ahead and do it" but this does sound like
a question that should be posed to the people who will attend. Your
opinion would be valued if you could take the time to reply, but
please try to summarize at the top of any replies with a "Yes" or
"No" (even if you have more things to say) so I can keep a bit closer
eye on the reply volumes. Feel free to reply on or off list.

JT

--
--
John Todd jtodd at digium.com
Asterisk Open Source Community Director

[astmattf at gmail.com]

Hello,

I would recommend that if you do add another tech track that you spend
a great deal of effort trying to make sure that sessions that would
appeal to similar audiances are not done at the same time. This has
happened a few times in past Astricons and it's always a tough choice
for attendees that are interested in both talks to choose between
them.

To this end, I might suggest even video-recording the presentations to
be replayed at night during the conference(or possibly on the web) so
attendees can see what they missed if they were unable to sit in on a
presentation.

One other suggestion I might make is that after 6PM I think there
might be a benefit from loosly structured BOF or discussion sessions.
There is only so much Red Bull and Alcohol you can drink in the code
zone. I quickly organized two after-hours discussion sessions during
last year's Astricon and actually had a few dozen people involved in
each one, it would be great if this could be done on a larger scale
and officially organized.

Thanks,

MATT---

On 6/12/08, John Todd <jtodd at digium.com> wrote:

[stotaro at totarotechn...]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 7:57 PM, Matt Florell <astmattf at gmail.com> wrote:

[cjames at callone.net]

John Todd wrote:

[jra at baylink.com]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 08:52:27PM -0400, Steve Totaro wrote: